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CAMBRIDGE FREE THOUGHTS 



AND 



LETTERS ON BIBLIOLATRY; 



TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN OF G. E. LESS1NG, 



BY 

H. H. BERNARD, Ph. Dr. 

AUTHOR OF THE "CREED AND ETHICS OP THE JEWS EXHIBITED IN SELECTIONS 

FROM THE YAD HACHAZAKAH OP MAIMONIDES." 

"bn^^n THE GUIDE OP THE HEBREW STUDENT." 

AND THE "Mn^ft ^ A PRACTICAL GRAMMAR OP THE HEBREW 
LANGUAGE, &C, &C. 



Stat nominis umbra. 



EDITED BY 

ISAAC BERNARD, 

COMMANDER, P. AND O. COMPANY'S SERVICE. 



TRUBNER AND CO., 60, PATERNOSTER ROW. 

1862. 






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EDITOR'S PREFACE. 



On my return to England, after a long absence 
in the Indian and China Seas, my first object 
was to rescue, if possible, from oblivion, for a 
short space at least, the name of my learned 
Father. Cambridge has done him indeed abundant 
honour as to his Hebraistic and Pedagogic ac- 
complishments. But of his views upon far more 
important matters — to which Philology is but the 
handmaid — Cambridge knows next to nothing. 
My Father shrunk "from the strife of tongues." 
Mother Church (much as we respect that "time- 
honoured" Lady) has not always "that excellent 
thing in woman, a voice soft, gentle, and low." 
But the Church is not an unprotected Female. 
She is built on a rock, not lightly "carried 
about with every wind of doctrine," namely, 
her vested interests. 



iv editor's preface. 

She will therefore permit a filial tribute to a 
Father's memory, made, like the sacrifice of the 
ancient Persians, after sunset 

" Nihil ultra mihi cum Luthero" said Charles V. 
when the Spanish soldiery wished to scatter the 
bones of the Great Reformer. 

Lass die Todten ruhen! 

ISAAC BERNARD. 



4, Camden Place, Cambridge, 
23 June, 1862. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 



He hated to excess, 
With an unquiet and intolerant scorn. 
The hollow puppets of a hollow age. 



Bibliolatry, — what a word! Why disturb our 
minds by letters of a German, when we have 
"Essays and Keviews," in abundance, for those, 
who like such reading. I will explain by two 
samples. 

I. — In re-Deuteronomy v. Exodus, or 
Sunday v. Sabbath. 
The first step from the worship of the letter to 
the sound and truthful Bible-Spirit worship, should 
be to take down, from the walls of our cathedrals, 
parish churches and college chapels, and erase, 
from our Communion Service and Catechism, the 
XXth chapter of Exodus. 

Hold ! Gentlemen of the society for the sup- 
pression of vice,— stop your messenger, and hear 
me. I would humbly suggest to convocation, or 
rather to parliament, as a more constitutional, and 

b 



VI INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 

a somewhat more rational assembly, if they value 
truth, and would gain the hearts of the people, to 
substitute, in place thereof, that other form of the 
Decalogue, written in the fifth chapter of Deute- 
ronomy, — " written" alike, gentlemen, " with the 
"finger of God," — which finger points no more to 
Sabbatarianism , a lesson which addressed the Child; 
but to humanity, which is to be our lesson, till time 
shall be no more. 

Our Reformers, great and good men, had not 
time for every thing ; their vocation was not Biblical 
scholarship, but to be burnt, and thus light a candle, 
of whose light, we, their descendants, have not yet 
sufficiently availed ourselves. Others have laboured, 
and we have not yet entered into their labours. And 
the Sabbath, the poor man's grievance, — " a yoke 
" which neither we nor our fathers were able to 
bear;"*— may be a specimen of the sort of rational 
reformation to be petitioned for, at the hands of 
our rulers. Let us compare then Exodus with 
Deuteronomy, placing them side by side.f 



.* See the recorded vote of censure, by the Scotch clergy, on parties 
who had saved a shipwrecked vessel on Sabbath!— v. Buckle's Hist, of Civ. 
vol. 2. 

f But I must explain myself. We have a work written by a master 
of a college, wherein he commends Deuteronomy, as more spiritual than 
Exodus ; because the former says : " thou shalt not desire thy neighbour's 
"wife"; and the latter, only: "thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's 
" wife." Now here the Hebrew word being, in the original, precisely the 
same ("rfonn)» this same learned Theban, should have reserved his 

criticism, for an exercise in his own college chapel. This is not exactly 
the method we adopt. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 



Vll 



Exodus, 
Ch. xx., v. 11. 

For in six days the Lord 
made heaven and earth, the 
sea, and all that in them is, 
and rested the seventh day : 
wherefore the Lord blessed 
the seventh day, and hallowed 
it. 



Deuteronomy, 
Ch. v., v. 14, 15. 
That thy man servant and thy 
maid servant may rest as well as 
thou. And remember that thou 
wast a servant in the land of 
Egypt, and that the Lord thy 
God brought thee out thence 
through a mighty hand and by 
a stretched out arm; therefore 
the Lord thy God commanded 
thee to keep the Sabbath day. 



Two distinct reasons being here asserted for 
keeping the Sabbath, which, we ask, ought to be 
constantly held up to the eyes of our people*? 
Exodus is the stronghold of the ancient and modern 
Pharisee. I appeal, from the present conventional 
preference of Exodus, to our Lord himself, — to his 
precept and to his example ; " The Sabbath was 
" made for man, and not man for the Sabbath." 
"My Father worketh hitherto, and I work."* 

Here he putteth away the first reason, that he 
may establish the better. 

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I 
" understood as a child, I thought as a child : but 



* " Thou thoughtest me such as thyself." Our notion of heaven is 
often the reflection of our earth upon its clouds. 

So of the attributes of heaven. 

To the over-tasked slave, in sultry Egypt, rest appeared supreme feli- 
city ; and " God rested from his work." 

To the lively, free Greek, in his lovely climate, energy and full de- 
velopement of mind and limb was bliss. Hence Aristotle's idea of the 
Supreme bliss was energy ; Jesus sanctioned the Greek rather than the 
Hebrew view : " my Father worketh hitherto." 

62 



Vlll INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 

" when I became a man, I put away childish things." 
Already in the days of Deuteronomy the sun was 
peeping above the mountains, to scatter the early 
morning mists. In the eye of reason, God resteth 
not, neither slumbereth, nor sleepeth ; out of his 
own mouth is the Sabbatarian condemned. Like 
Shylock he would turn to the bond, and lo! the 
finger of God writeth therein ; " more precious in 
"his eyes, than the letter of the bond, is one drop 
" of the poor man's blood." " Dear shall their blood 
" be in his sight." 

How will the poor man bless the legislator's 
boon, who rescinds Pharisaical, Judicial restrictions 
on the Sunday — " Touch not, taste not, handle 
" not," — who will thus turn the Sabbath into the 
genuine Sunday, a day of hope, and promise, and 
activity ; not like the stagnant pool, but as the 
living, running waters, sparkling in the sun, and 
fertilizing the earth ; gladdening, as well as purifying, 
the thoughts and feelings of the heart. To seek 
for Sunday in the Jewish Sabbath, is to seek the 
living among the dead. Already in Deuteronomy, 
the myth yields to reason ; the bond slave, with his 
wife and his children, in every age and clime, is 
the primary object of God's tenderness in the enact- 
ment. The law was to lead to the "adoption of 
" children,"—" the service of perfect freedom." 

" Henceforth I call you not servants ; for the 
"servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I 
" have called you friends ; for all things that I have 



P INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. IX 

" heard of my Father I have made known unto 
u you." The twilight should lead us on, unto the 
perfect day. To go back to the monks, or the 
Pharisees, is to prefer darkness to light. " The 
" law is good" only " if a man use it lawfully." 

Compulsory abridgement of the poor man's inno- 
cent enjoyments is directly opposed to the spirit 
of the Bible. Sunday is a day when those confined 
by in-door, sedentary, six-days work may change 
the scene, and stretch their limbs, with healthful 
exercise, in the fresh breeze, in the green fields, 
under the open sky. Crowded and prolonged as- 
semblies vitiate the air ; let him survey more God's 
temple, " not built with hands," the arch of heaven 
and its "majestical roof, fretted with golden fires." 
" God made the country," says Cowper, " man made 
" the town." Leave me alone, one day, with nature's 
beauty, to renovate my mind. Hear the words of one 
of the people, and pardon a dash of bitterness in one 
of a most noble nature, but who felt bereaved of his 
birthright, by the restraints of Sabbatarian ordinances. 

" Oh the miraculous influence of beautiful woodland, and 
" heather and moss ! They enable one to think of Whigs, Tories, 
" Priests and practical men, with all their jugglery, and the folly 
" on which they prey, without a feeling of acidity !" 

C. R. Pemberton's Remains, p. 258. 

II.— The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing 
but the Bible. 

To show the absurdity of such cant phrases, we 
have but to analyse each part of the sentence. 



X INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 

The Bible. That is, an indivisible totality must 
be made of treatises, varying in languages and age, 
consisting of parts most heterogeneous, not to say 
incongruous, — the works of authors most unequal 
in style, in matter, in value and importance; and 
therefore in degree of inspiration : a self-contradictory 
position ! 

Accordingly these Bible-gentlemen already split 

upon the Apocrypha — is it, or is it not, to be bound 

up together, as part and parcel of the Bible % These 

absurdities may remind us of the Indian god with 

a hundred arms, intended as an emblem of unlimited 

strength, but forming only a grotesque idol. But 

perhaps the Bible itself contains the best similitude : 

Behold a great image, whose brightness was excellent, and the 
form thereof terrible. This image's head was of fine gold, his breast 
and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, his legs of 
iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay * * * then was the 
iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces 
together, &c. 

The forced union is fatal to each part, " mole 
" ruit sua." As a whole, few books are really less 
read. 

The whole Bible. There are parts of Leviticus, 
the Song of Songs,* Genesis, chap, xxxviii. and 
Ezekiel, chap. xxiii,-|* which as little merit a place 

• A beautiful love song is very well in its time and place. But " what 
" does the honest man do in my closet?" And then the headings of each 
chapter, meant to catch the precisian's eye, like Pharisaic fringe and 
phylactery — e.g. " The church having a taste of Christ's love, is sick of 
*' love," are revolting to common sense. 

f There are other passages, which, assuredly, would not have escaped 
animadversion, from a Levitical society for the suppression of vice. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. XI 

in a canon of books of " instruction in righteous- 
" ness," as Ser Ciappelletto deserved a place in 
the canon of saints ; while the rejected Apocryphal 
book Ecclesiasticus, as little deserves exclusion, as 
would St. Francis de Sales,* from the list of beatified 
worthies. 

Nothing but the Bible. That this collection of 
Jewish writings, — justly called the Book of Books, — ■ 
has been, and still is, of inestimable value to the 
human race, we admit. Though far from identical 
with the word of God, it may, in a qualified sense, 
be said to contain it. But is it to supersede all 
other books'? It is a help, not a substitute, for 
reason and science. It is one of many Bibles, 
vouchsafed to the family of man. The most 
ancient legislators ever referred their laws to law yet 
older, — more time-honoured, — infinitely more just, — 
namely, to the whisper of God, in man's conscience. 
It was this made Aristides just, and Socrates content 
to die. It is that unwritten, — that living law of 
nature, the same yesterday, to day and for ever, 
and of whose fullness all branches of the human 
family partake, and of whose earthly origin, who 
can tell the beginning ? " In the waves of the sea," 
says the Divine Wisdom, " and in all the earth, and 
" in every people and nation, I got a possession. "f 

* That charming, but very scarce book " L' esprit du B. Francois de 
" Sales," in 6 vols. 8vo. by Bishop Carnus, — a perfect Bos well,— shews 
that it is possible for a Romish saint to be both admirable as a man, and a 
perfect gentleman. 

■j" zv iravri Xaco Kai zQvzi E/CTfjo-a/x^i/, — Eccl, xxiv. 6. 



XII INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. 

" Man is heir of all the ages." God speaks to 
mankind, at divers times and places, in divers 
manners. He, who giveth corn to the Caucasian, 
giveth rice to the Hindoo. Various books equally 
ancient with the Bible, contain alike truths of 
natural religion, most clear, most elevated, most 
deep. The ancient sacred books of the Brahmins 
display many worthy representations of the Deity. 
In all ages, and in all lands, have there been pri- 
vileged souls, who have soared in thought, far 
beyond the sphere of their contemporaries, and 
drawn from the same great fountain of light, and 
communicated that light to others, as they were 
able to bear it. 

It was God, who spake in the Zend-Avesta,— 
the Koran, — by Confucius, — by Plato, — by Epic- 
tetus, — by Simplicius, — by Antoninus, — by 

" The Samian, Bactrian Sage, and all, who taught the right." 

cs Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things 
-" are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever 
"things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, 
" whatsoever things are of good report," are found, 
ever and anon, written in the rolls of these sages, 
no less by the finger of God, than was the Mosaic 
Decalogue, graven on the tablets of stone. 

" Every good gift and every perfect gift," we 
are told by the Apostle, " is from above, and cometh 
" down from the Father of lights ;" as surely there- 
fore, by his inspiration, did Homer rhapsodize, and 



INTRODUCTORY NOTICE. XU1 

* c sweetest Shakespeare" preach from his pulpit, the 
stage, as did Jesus, in his sermon on the mount. 

It is only, as the Eabbins say, the measure of 
inspiration, which differs in each particular case. 

If in our Lord's case, it be " in measure without 
measure" can this be said of discordant Genealogies ? 

Our samples have been of unconscionable length, 
but we now proceed to give some account of the 
letters, and of their author. 



PREFACE. 



Introduction. 

The highest privilege, and the chiefest consola- 
tion of man, consists in communion with his Maker. 
The purest of pleasures in life, is to attend " the 
auld kirk" with Father and Mother, in childlike 
reverence, that knows not doubt. We all of us fain 
would die in the same faith, wherein our fathers died. 

But the age of reason succeeds to the age of 
innocence. What was the strength of the child 
may be the weakness of the man. That faith 
which was to be the guardian of our moral nature, 
may become a blind credulity, destructive of our 
high birthright — intellectual freedom of thought. 

Hence, in days of free enquiry tending to the 
disruption of established creeds, it is natural that 
the state of man 

" Like to a little kingdom, suffers then 
" The nature of an insurrection." 

There are the martyrs to reason, as well as martyrs 
to faith, and the sharpest trials of each probably 
consist, not in the outward endurance, — the dungeon, 
the scaffold, and the stake, — but in those inward 
struggles of the soul, of which the eye takes no 



PREFACE. XV 

heed, and " a stranger intermeddleth not there- 
" with." 

We live in such a crisis.* It is vain to conceal 
the fact; it is time we must awake out of sleep. 
We must awake to the realities of the broad day. 
In vain would we continue the sleep of reason. 
In our days, at least, the sun makes no compact 
with the dial, "to return ten degrees, by which 
"degrees it was gone down;" — in vain would we 
make the hand of the old church clock point 
again to Mediceval. The sun is risen upon the 
earth, and we must abide the toil and the heat of 
the day. It were vain for the mature Adam to 
dream of his infant paradise, — he must set to work, 
with his apron and his hoe. 

Such is the great drama of our day, — a drama 
fraught with high actions and high passions, in 
which the writer of the following letters supported 
no ignoble or undistinguished part. 

Lessing as a dramatist and a man of letters. 

It is hard to realise the false conceptions enter- 
tained about Lessing, till a recent period. In the 
beginning of this century Jean Paul writes : " With 
"regard to other countries we must consider, that 
" the constellation of our new literature, having 



* Meanwhile few except factious partisans will deny, that the ex- 
tremes of High and Low Church are equally betraying the cause of rational 
and pure Religion — which is the true strength of a people. 
" A plague o' both your houses !" 



XVI PREFACE. 

" risen only half a century ago, the rays of it are 
" still on the road thither." 

This was pre-eminently so with our Islanders, 
" — Toto divisos orbe Britannos." 
John Bull stands aloof, — is content with his own 
highly creditable idiosyncrasy, — virtute me involvo, — 
defends the fogs and mists which obscure the light 
within, as he does (in the Play) the atmosphere 
without, " replete with vapours :" " The air of 
" England goes ten times as far, — it must, you know, 
for it's ten times as thick." 

Johnson — that pompous vamper of common-places, 
often more trite than true, — that impersonation of 
Anglican prejudice, whose Cyclopian figure, photo- 
graphed by Boswell, as a Sampson Agonistes, making 
onslaught on the Philistines, was so long the delight 
of our boyhood and our riper years, — Johnson's 
star was in the ascendant. " Sir, I love a good 
"hater," " Eousseau to the gallies, — to the hulks 
" with Voltaire, — German books to the bottom of 
" the German Ocean." 

" Forgive my transports on a theme like this, 
" I cannot bear a French metropolis." 

Slowly through the fogs of Thames, and the 
mists of Edinburgh, calmly, silently rose to notice 
the bright star of Lessing — fairest among the 
" living saphirs" of German genius. 

Slowly — for while enshrined in the Walhalla 
among the greatest of his age, embalmed in the 
heart of his father-land, and preserved in the library 



PREFACE. XV11 

of nations, Lessing's master-piece " Nathan" was 
thus criticised in an early number of the Edinburgh 
Review : 

" The work before us is as genuine sour krout as ever perfumed 
" a feast in Westphalia."* 

But the opening of the continent, peace, and 
steam conveyance have brought at length, that best 
of free trade, interchange and intercommunion of 
thought among the foremost spirits of the great 
European family, so essential to the progress of 
civilization and humanity. 

Slowly upon us also at last the planet of Lessing 

" rising in clouded majesty, unveil'd her peerless 

"light." Twenty years later the Edinburgh Review 

writes : 

" We confess, we should be entirely at a loss for the literary 
" creed of that man who reckoned Lessing other than a thoroughly 
" cultivated writer ; nay, entitled to rank in this particular with the 
" most distinguished writers of any existing nation. As a poet, as a 
" critic, philosopher or controversialist, his style will be found 
"precisely such as we of England are accustomed to admire 
" most. Brief, nervous, vivid ; yet quiet without glitter or anti- 
'* thesis ; idiomatic, pure without purism, transparent yet full of 
"character and reflex hues of meaning."f 

But alas ! what charms the British Critic, — as 
in unison with his own intolerance, — is Lessing's 
weakest point, his sweeping abuse of Voltaire. 

" The first foreigner who had the glory of proclaiming 
"Shakespeare to be the greatest dramatist, the world had ever 

* Ed. Bev., Ap., 1806, p. 149. The translation reviewed was the very 
respectable one by W. Taylor of Norwich, 
f Ed. Rev., Oct., 1827, p. 321. 



XV111 PREFACE. 

"seen, was Gottlob (Gotthold) Ephraim Lessing * * * He 
" attacked Voltaire with polemical dexterity, with rare acuteness, 
" with invincible logic, and at once dwarfed the conventional 
"elegancies of the Frenchman, by placing them beside the 
"majestic proportions of our giant."* 

After all, it was as a being of understanding 
and reason — not as a Poet — Lessing best under- 
stood Shakspere. In doing justice to Lessing let 
us also not be unjust to Voltaire. "What is true 
"in him, is not new," said Lessing. Yes, but 
Voltaire gave new life to what lay bedridden in 
the dormitory of men's souls. " Voltaire's humor 
" is mere persiflage" says Jean Paul. True, but 
persiflage was natural to Voltaire, and style is no 
more to be censured, Lessing himself has said, 
than a man's nose on his face. Besides it suited 
his age and country, and with this keen weapon 
alone, of ridicule, was he to discomfit the bigots, 
and 

" Drive those holy Vandals off the stage." 

Hence — hinc illce lacrimce — whatever he said 
or did was, and still is, of course, grossly mis- 
represented. " Ecrasez Vinfame" applied by him 
to the Jesuit, is still repeatedly quoted as though 
meant for the Lord Jesus. As to Shakespere, 
Voltaire had no childish jealousy, like Byron. He 
did him all justice possible — for a Frenchman. 
His mind, Goethe truly observes, was not Teutonic, 
but the highest conceivable intellectual power, that 

• Ed. Rev., July, 1849, p. 61. 



PREFACE. XIX 

France and Frenchmen could produce. Why should 
not great men, of most varied mould, stand, side 
by side, in our libraries % Why 

"so devote to Aristotle's ethicks 
" That Ovid be an outcast quite abjur'd" ? 

There are moods when each gives each a double 
charm. " From serious Antonine," says Dr. 
Armstrong,* "to Eabelais' ravings." Man is heir 
of all the ages ; the world of intellect is wide 
enough to embrace both, and to these two great 
European instructors, Shakespere and Voltaire, is 
mainly due the kindliness of modern philosophy. 

Lessi7ig as a Theologian. 

But leaving Lessing's general merits to his able 
biographer Stahr,-j* we proceed to his character as 
an amateur in theology, with which we are now 
more immediately concerned. 

According to his own testimony^ Lessing was 
no Eationalist, he disliked the inconsistency of the 
semi-supra-semi-naturalists, from Origen down to 
Socinus, Locke and Bishop Thirl wall's " Schleier- 
" macher." It is vain after swallowing the camel, 
to affect being choked by the tail. If Saint Denis 



* In his "Art of preserving Health." 

f G. E. Lessing, sein Leben und seine Werke von Adolf Stahr. 
Berlin, 1859. 

X "I have especially defended the Orthodox Lutheran Christian 
"Religion against Roman Catholics, Socinians, and Neologians." 

" The Reverend Gentleman has expressed his approbation by word of 
"month, and in print." 



XX PREFACE. 

really walked with his head under his arm, " Ce 
" n'est que le premier pas qui coute." When once 
quietly installed in the Ark, " the lion," Bishop 
Home judiciously observes, " would eat straw like 
"the ox." When the prophet Jonah sits hymning 
and harping in the whale's belly, it is a work of 
supererogation in the Rev. Thos. Hart well Home, 
in his inimitable farrago,* to lessen our wonder 
by quoting the naturalists, that living bodies are 
not digestible. 

Far more logically consistent, he thought with 
Dr. Arnold,f were the English Deists. Them he 
regarded with an admiration, not unmixed with 
terror. Those stout English hearts reminded him of 
the Pilgrim Fathers, first crossing the wide Atlantic. 

" Thus sung they in an English boat 
" An holy and a cheerful note ; 
"And all the way to guide their chime, 
" With falling oars they kept the time. 

" What shall we do but sing His praise, 
" Who led us thro' the wat'ry maze, 
" Unto an isle so long unknown 
"And yet far kindlier than our own. 

" And 'mid these rocks for us did frame 
"A temple where to sound His name." 

* Introduction to the Bible. 

f " Unitarianism, acknowledging the authority of Scripture, and assert- 
" ing its own peculiar interpretation of it, appears to me to lose in strength 
" intellectually exactly as much as I hope it gains by so doing morally." 
Dr. Arnold's Serm. 1845, p. 218. 

Surely the more logically consistent we are in forming our religious 
opinions, the more truthful and therefore the more moral we are. 

Rejecting the stronger evidence is the greatest immorality which the 
case can admit. 



PREFACE. XXI 

These daring men had acted in strict accordance 
with the counsels of the great Athenian sage;* 
when the more safe, more firm, and more convenient 
vessel, traditional revelation, appeared to them no 
longer sea-worthy, they had perilled their souls 
along the voyage of life in long-boat, or self- 
constructed raft, of the best and most irrefragable 
reasoning, which the case afforded, and thus in 
humble reliance in the common Father of mankind, 
had been wafted down the stream of Time into the 
Ocean of Eternity. 

But was the dear old Biblical ship indeed proved 
by them to be thus crazy? Was not the raft too 
hastily constructed ? 

" Bound on a voyage of awful length, 
"And dangers little known, 
"A stranger to superior strength, 
"Man vainly trusts his own." 

The English deists,f as Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 
Tindal, Collins, Woolston, Chubb, Toland, Mande- 
ville, and Shaftsbury, though full of genius, fire, 
vivacity, and life, seemed to Lessing deficient in 
ancient Greek, or at least Oriental Literature, 
The inimitable Bolingbroke indeed must be ex- 



* Plato's Phsedo, p. 85, C. D. 

f It is refreshing to have at last a somewhat philosophical account 
of these men, in the " Gesehichte des Englischen Deismus von Gr. V. 
"Lechler, Stuttgart, 1841," instead of the innately vulgar works of Leland 
and Van Mildert, where they are strung together as heterogeneous vermin, 
nailed on a barn. 



XXU PREFACE. 

cepted. How it was possible for so young a man, 
a premier, immersed in politics, and unhappily in 
all the pleasures of the town, to take so masterly 
a precis of ancient Greek philosophy and Kabbinic 
lore, we are at a loss to conceive. His remains, — 
conversations with Pope and Swift, — are among the 
most amusing literature of England. 

And, as to "the life that now is," what was 
the deist's hope? Lessing's good sense saw the 
world everywhere close the gates of mercy upon 
the free-speaker. The tamely obedient horse* is 
pampered in the stall; — the wild horse, free as the 
winds of the wilderness, perishes of hunger and 
want. He did not choose to descend into the arena 
in the cause of Truth, not fully ascertained, — with 
a morituri te salutant, — to exhibit himself as the 
dying gladiator, before a reckless and unfeeling 
public. 

The defenders of the faith, indeed, both ancient 
and modern, he viewed with unutterable scorn, 
"mumbling with toothless rage," as Warburton 
describes Waterland's answer to Tindal. Such de- 
fences betray any cause. "It is not the mob I 
"fear," said an officer of the Guards during the 
riots, "it is the fire of the Volunteers, exposes us 
" to hourly danger." But there must be deep truth 

* The wild tenants of the wood and mountain are designated in 
Hebrew as "living" beasts, (nit#n"TV , n\ from the fire and vivacity — 
quick breath and stir of blood— which characterise their life of attack and 
defence, as contrasted with the sleepy existence of the sheep and cow, 
(servum pecus). 



PREFACE. XX111 

in that book, thought Lessing, which outlives and 
outlasts such intensely ridiculous lines of defence. 
And so, in short, he pursued no further the paths 
of men of dangerous parts, and fatal learning — as 
deserts, whitened by the bones of many a too curious 
traveller, — and kept the broad track of " Mecca* 
"and the Caravan," — those primrose paths of 
dalliance which the world's favourites tread, and 
those soft cushioned stalls, where blockheads hear, 
—-and sleep! 

JReimarus. 

From this happy slumber Lessing was aroused, 
as by the sound of a trumpet. His residence at 
Hamburg had introduced him to the family of 
the great Hermann Samuel Eeimarus, lately dead. 
He was much interested in learning, from the son 
and daughter, various particulars of their illustrious 
parent. Eeimarus had for many years filled the 
chair of professor of Oriental literature. He was 
a prodigy of universal learning; with piety more 
than enough for a convent, and with the learning 
of a Pearson, " the dust of whose writings," Bentley 
tell us, "is gold." In the reason of man, in the 
instincts of animals, in every realm of Nature, he 

* But to avoid religious jars, 
The laws are my expositors, 
Which in my doubting mind create 
Conformity to Church and State. 
I go, pursuant to my plan, 
To Mecca with the Caravan. 

Green's Spleen. 



XXIV PREFACE. 

referred everything to the Immutable, and perceived 
the Godhead alike in all. The bright cheerfulness 
with which he had borne continual sickness revealed 
to his family that he lived above time and the 
world; the ever quick and open spirit, from which 
neither what is rarest, nor most ordinary escaped, 
showed with what unwearied ardour he sought for 
every trace of the Godhead, — with what eagerness 
he watched for its slightest manifestation. He in- 
herited the philological fame of his great father-in- 
law, Fabricius, and Poison attests the transcendant 
merits of his Dion Cassius. His " Principal truths of 
" Natural Religion,"* was long the text book through- 



* How different is the native eloquence of one who writes from the 
heart, from that of the hired Tertullus of the schools, — especially when 
the Professional Esprit de Corps whispers to the latter, not to go too far. 

"Plac'd at the door of learning, youth to guide, 
" We never suffer it to stand too wide." 

Arnica Veritas — sed magis arnica Ecclesia. What would Reimarus say 
to a writer who received a thousand pounds to write on "the Power, 
'•Wisdom, and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation," who 
begins by proclaiming all " utterly insufficient for the great ends of Religion" 
" which can, I well know," he says, "be achieved only by that Revealed 
"Religion, of which we are ministers,"* and so makes the very heavens 
to tell the glory of his own order, and the importance of the cloth ? 
Ye Gods ! the countless millions that have, and do, and are to tread 
this planet, are to drink no water, but through the Lambeth, Oxford, and 
Cambridge Water-works' Society. Was the counsel at the bar retained 
by Lord Bridgewater to plead for or against poor Natural Religion? 
It required a stalwart frame and unbashful forehead thus to disparage 
"Divinest Nature,"— the heavens that tell the glory of God, and the 
firmament that shOweth his handy work. Alas ! all unction,— the sweet 
wine and the feast of fat things must be reserved for the Christian Theo- 
logical pulpit, or " Othello's occupation's gone." 

But this gentleman's lukewarmness in the cause of Natural Religion, 
is pardonable compared with the violent attack of another defender of 
the Christian faith, who goes right near to promulgate Atheism under 



PREFACE. XXV 

out the Continent, on this most important of all 
branches of enquiry, and supplied Paley alike with 
plan and materials. His Job is a model comment. 

But the marvel of marvels was to follow, the 
defender of Venice was the u Bravo of Venice." 
The very accomplished Elise Reimarus revealed the 
secret to Lessing, that her father had entrusted 
to her hands " An apology for the rational wor- 
shippers of God." He had found reason points 
to Natural Religion, as surely as the magnetic 
needle to the north. This great work (still pub- 
lished but in part) had been the darling object of 
all his thoughts and studies, during the last thirty 
years of his life. And here every point of Church 
orthodoxy was demonstrated to be indefensible, 
wherever she departed from the voice of conscience, 
—the sanctity of reason. — the earliest teachings of 
the glorious heavens above, and the earth beneath,— 
the regular course of divine providence. 



the Oxford Protestant cowl. Here the heart is moved, but it is on the 
side of interest. 

"Little Cupid took his stand 

"Upon the widow' 's jointure land." 

To plead the uncertainties of metaphysics, in order to force the Athanasian 
Creed upon our consciences and reason, —to say that, without the present 
Church Establishment, mankind must "live without God in the world,'* 
and die without hope, like a dog in a ditch,— to scare us from defending 
our Christian liberties, by pointing to the dark mines and counter-mines 
of an uncertain controversial divinity, — what is all this but to betray 
the town to the enemy, and fire the citadel with our own hands in order 
to enhance the importance of some advanced, paltry block-house, on whose 
preservation forsooth depend our vested interests and shares ? 

* Astronomy, &c, Bridge-water Treatise. London, 1833, p. vi. and vu. 



XXVI PREFACE. 

Is it to be called a fault, a weakness, or a virtue, 
that Reimarus, like Pythagoras and so many others, 
kept back from the many, his esoteric doctrine] 
"He scanned our nature with a brother's eye," he 
regarded human errors in religion with tenderness 
and pity. Poor children of Adam! picking up 
pebbles on the shores of the vast ocean of truth, 
why imbrue your hands in a brother's blood, or 
dip the pen in gall, because each esteems his own 
the prettiest pebble] He venerated religious pre- 
judices, and, like the good Melancthon, would have 
besought his aged mother to continue her attendance 
at Mass, — it was her Eeligion.* 

What nights of prayer and tears had not his 
investigations caused himself. Such awful subjects 
seemed, again and again, to demand reverend and 
blind submission ! Only " Fools rush in where 
"angels fear to tread." At least it was the safe 
side that his discoveries should die with him. He 
shrunk, as Lessing says, from notoriety and coteries, 
from politics, and noisy adherents of a popular 
heresy. He detested factious tongues, and the 



* This has since been carried too far. "I wish my son, Marcus," 
says Niebuhr, "to believe all the letter of the Gospel narrative, though 
ft my criticism can so easily demolishlt." But what did son Marcus become, 
when, in manhood, he learnt the Paternal trick ? Alas ! a reactionist 
poltroon, with the motto " Populus vult decipi, decipiatur!" If this be 
theses Christiana of young Germany who will not sigh for the prisca fides 
of the antique world. 

"Who dares think one thing and another tell, 
f* My heart detests him as the gates of hell." 



PREFACE. XXV11 

reputation of a popular orator, gained by a warm 
fancy, and able lungs, — vox et praterea nihil. 

He was a true scholar and recluse, who valued 
sound sleep by night, study and ease, far above 
all fame. Such a man 

"Glows while he reads, but trembles as he writes." 

He would write anonymously, if at all, — take any 
name, — gladly steal from the world, and not a stone 
tell where he lies. 

It requires great moral courage to pass the fire 
of orthodoxy. "If to be honest as the world goes," 
says Mr. Justice Talfourd, "is to be one of ten 
"thousand, to be honest as the mind ivorks, is to 
" be one man of a million." Even the dauntless 
Wilkes was daunted here : " I remain, however, 
" sound in the faith, and will keep to my good 
" orthodox mother, the Church of England, to the 
"last moment of its--4egal establishment." And 
so Home Tooke, " Bosville and I have entered into 
"a strict engagement, to belong for ever to the 
"established church, the established government, 
"the established language. Do but establish, and 
"we are convinced of its propriety." Eeimarus 
was no man of bronze or of iron, to pass the fort- 
resses of superstition and intolerance, ably served 
by well-disciplined mercenaries, — to pass the fire 
also of those dreadful rifle-pits, — secret slanderers, 
— compared with which the charge at Balaklava 
was a trifle. In a word Eeimarus resembled the 



XXV111 PREFACE. 

English Bishops.* " Eich men furnished with ability, 
" living peaceably in their habitations, — honoured 
" in their generations," regarded as, " the glory of 
" their times." Peace and repose their dear delight, 
" Content to dwell in decencies for ever." 

Lessing publishes the Fragments. 

Lessing saw all the learning of the ancient 
world stood revealed to Reimarus; he saw, it was 
his timid nature, which had kept him silent. Why 
keep under a bushel, what might give light to all 
in the house 1 One seventh part of Eeimarus 
would outweigh seven " budge Doctors " of the 
Theologic "fur." The kindest, gentlest, noblest of 
the sons of Adam had said: "If it were not so, 
" I would have told you." Ought we then to conceal 
the truth ? He had a romantic love of truth, how- 
ever neglected and decried. With Middleton, he 
looked upon the discovery of any thing which is 
true as a valuable acquisition to society; which 
cannot possibly hurt or obstruct the good effect of 



* When such Bight Reverend Fathers forget themselves, they are 
sometimes roughly reminded,— they are but men ! See a very amusing 
scene, between an English Bishop and Goethe, in Eckermann ; (Gesprache 
mit Goethe, vol. in., p. 327), as the passage is accidentally omitted in 
Oxenford's masterly translation, we subjoin an extract: "Hold! when 
"your sermons on the terrors of hell-fire torments, harrow the weak 
"souls in your congregations, so that some have lost their senses, and 
V ended their days in a madhouse ! — when ye sow the pernicious seeds 
" of doubt, in the minds of your Christian hearers, by many orthodox 
M dogmas, quite untenable by reason,— involving the half strong, half 
*« weak, in a labyrinth from which death alone will extricate them, — &c." 



PREFACE. XXIX 

any other truth whatsoever : for they all partake 
of one common essence, and necessarily coincide 
with each other ; and like the drops of rain which 
fall separately into the river, mix themselves at once 
with the stream, and strengthen the general current. 
What though the highest classes in rank, wealth, 
and commerce were cold and indifferent to aught, 
but the most practical bearings of the subject, — 
the balance in their banker's book, he would brave 
the " world's dread laugh" and withering sneer.* 

Nor did he dread the influence of truth upon 
the people. The poor people ! he thought, with 
Jean Paul, everywhere are they invited into the 
court of the palace, when the heaviest burdens of 
war or of peace are to be carried away ; everywhere 
are they driven out of it, when light, the greatest 
of treasures is to be communicated. With what 
right does any one class demand exclusive possession 
of light ] — unless indeed it means also to claim ex- 
clusive possession of the iniquitous power of ruling 
more absolutely from its own light over others' 
darkness. 

Can a state permit the development of the facul- 
ties of human nature only to certain individuals, 
as it grants titles and orders'? 

But upon this matter the old arguments, — the 
hoary satellites of despotism, still exist ; namely, 

* Lessing even defended the thrice- eccentric (Amory's) " JohnBuncle," 
Charles Lamb's favorite book, from the shafts of Wieland, Vol. 29, p. 495, 
Berlin, 1794. 



XXX FREFACE. 

that the people, like horses and birds in the mill 
or fowling floor, serve both their own interests and 
the interest of the state, much better when blinded. 

But these decrepit servants of tyranny knavishly 
assume that the same sunlight which is useful on 
the mountains, is mischievous in valleys ; and that 
want of education, though it will not protect the 
high against corruption, will the low : that truth 
misunderstood can never become truth misused, 
except among the people. 

Lessing thought the time was come; and do 
what we will, man's reason is at length awake, 
and aroused like a giant refreshed with wine. 

He resolved to publish the great work of Rei- 
marus in fragments, and to abide the consequence. 

Mendelsohn, 
Another circumstance, which attached Lessing 
to the liberal camp, was his friendship for the 
Jewish philosopher, Mendelsohn. 

" Blest with each talent and each art to please" 
Lessing saw this most amiable of men utterly 
disregarded by the world of rank and fashion, — he 
was of a class proscribed. * 

• Their friendship often admitted playful raillery. 

Lessing. " How did you rocognise my hand, in the pamphlet V 

Mend. «' My dear friend, I thought no one, but you, could display 
" such total ignorance of the Bible." 

At his first introduction to Madame Lessing, Mendelsohn brought in 
his hand a bouquet of the sweetest flowers, a present and peace-offering to 
soften the bad impression of his beard and gaberdine. Mendelsohn's 
son — " of virtuous father, virtuous son/' was also distinguished, as giving 
birth to the late amiable and eminently accomplished composer. 



PREFACE. XXXI 

The prejudice, which would exclude from our 
sympathies and communion of heart these " brethren 
" of the Lord, after the flesh" is in our day, fortu- 
nately, well-nigh obsolete. To learn the full power 
of prejudice we must transplant ourselves to the 
terrorist reign of intolerance. This will enable us 
also to test, by her genuine fruits, the true nature 
of Bibliolatry. Her votaries, among the civilized 
portion of the human family, are specially three, — 
the Hebrew, the Christian and the Moslem. These 
all " bow the knee to one alone," — all recognise one 
supreme common Father, with the slight difference 
of name Eloah* or Allah. But the rival claims to 
verbal inspiration of their traditional Scriptures, — Old 
Testament and Talmud,— New Testament and Tra- 
dition,— Koran and Sonnah, long rendered Hebrew, 
Christian and Moslem more mutually " hateful and 
" hating," if possible, than the united North and 
South American states, that is, with an enmity as 
implacable as that of the most imbruted Atheists, 
or the most benighted votaries of Fetichism and 
Devil-worship. Our friends under the Oxford cowl 
can scarcely realize the true horrors of the Crusades, 



• Or far more common 'Elohim' (Gods), a word like our Sunday, de- 
rived from Pagan ancestry If we abstract the consideration of revelation, 
Polytheism would precede by many ages Theism. Simplification and 
generalization is a gradual process. The plural name in Genesis seems an 
archaism derived from the older religion. 

Egypt probably first saw Theism exhibited as the esoteric doctrine.— 
Abram may have been initiated and adopted from the hierarchy much of 
the Theocracy, which was subsequently revived and systematized among 
the Hebrew race by Moses. 



XXX11 PREFACE. 

or they would hardly point to mediaeval times as 

one of the brightest seras in our humanity. 

The Christian, we fear, took the lead in bigotry 

and zeal. 

" In destruction of Maumetrie" 
" Increase of Christes law, 

was best shown, says Chaucer. 

" To chace these pagans, in those holy fields, 
" Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet, 
" Which fourteen hundred years ago, were nailed, 
" For our advantage, to the bitter cross." 

Mohammed's patience was, at last, quite ex- 
hausted : and he was in the end too apt a scholar in 
Dr. Johnson's school of " good haters." In the 
Koran we read, when "the trumpet calls together 
" the nations to judgment — all ' red whiskers and 

"grey eyes [j^j^ J^\ 3 ^] shall be gathered, 

" on the left, — as fuel for the fire.' " " These," says 
the Arab commentator Beidhawi, " are the people 
" of Rome (Franks), beyond idolaters in their deadly 
" hostility to us, and therefore most abominable to 
" Arabs." 

With the Saracen was included in one ban the 
other branch of the lineage of Abraham.* In spite 



• Christians attribute the degraded state of Israel to the accomplish- 
ment of a curse pronounced by their ancestors who put Jesus to death. 
" His blood be on us and on our children" ! But all we know of the Jews 
applies to those in Christendom or the Mahommedan empire. Now the 
insertion of these words in the sacred books of the Christians, naturally led 
to their accomplishment, and the Mahommedan, a sect of Christians, would 
naturally inherit the same abhorrence for the Jews. 



PREFACE. XXX111 

of David and the Son of David, " burn the Jew" 
was long the heritage of the Christian, bequeathed 
religiously from father to son. The dramatists 
caught the tone of the monkish writers of mysteries, 
and basely pandered to this inhuman thirst for 
Jewish blood. Marlow's " Jew of Malta" presents 
such diabolical features of mind and body, as never 
existed, but in an imagination the most depraved. 
And so the stage, the natural antidote against too 
much priest-craft, became the auxiliary of prejudice. 
Poor human nature ! Shakespear's Jew of Venice, 
while it seemed to gratify the same base feelings, in 
reality detected and laid them bare. For what a 
home lesson did the art of our immortal bard convey, 
to those who had " ears to hear," from the lips 
of Shylock ! 

" If a Jew wrong a Christian what is his humility ? revenge : 
" if a Christian wrong a Jew what should be his sufferance by 
" Christian example ? why revenge. The villainy you teach me I 
" will execute." 

In the hate and vindictive malice of the Jew, 
Christian intolerance is made to recognise its own 
ugly and mis-shapen offspring. 

Nor is the leaven of mediaeval bigotry quite 
extinct among us. Devout as we English may 
appear, there are devils, which go not forth at 
all by prayer and fasting, — and intolerance is 
one. Where do we find a more Christian gentle- 
man, in every good sense of the term, than Sir 



XXXIV PREFACE. 

Francis Goldsmid, and yet how tardily was the 
battle won, which allowed to sit in parliament, a 
chosen representative of our capital. Many a 
Hebrew of the present day, — as the candid and 
philosophic Salvador, Franck, Munk and Dukes, — 
differ far more from the mediaeval Jew, than many 
a present Christian, from those who burnt them. 
To drive superstition out of its den, to "drag the 
" struggling savage into day," were a thirteenth 
labour for Heracles. 

Nathan the Wise. 

"I will preach to them from my pulpit, the 
" stage," said Lessing; and my text shall be: " Sirs, 
" ye are brethren, why do ye wrong one to another," 
— and Nathan the wise was the result. Boccaccio's 
" Three Rings" supplied a nucleus for the plot, and 
the photograph of his unconscious friend Mendel- 
sohn supplied the angelic features of the Jewish 
sage in the piece, — the ideal of pure and perfect 
morality. 

"Nathan" was performed by Greek actors at 
Constantinople, in 1842. On the second perfor- 
mance the majority of the audience were Turks; 
their interest in the piece was intense, and though 
they seemed, at times, a little less tolerant than 
Saladin, at the plain speaking of the Jew, yet the 
story of 'the Three Rings' produced a manifest 
sensation. And at the close the "middle wall of 



PREFACE. XXXV 

"partition" gave way before the flood of gentler 
sentiments and more humane sympathies. 

" Homo sum ; humani nihil a me alienum puto." 

Moslems, with Greeks by their side, repeatedly 
cheered with enthusiasm the appeal from the stage, 
— the kindly recognition of the ties of brotherhood. 

The close of Lessing' s life. 

And what was the result ? Poor Lessing ! It 
is the old story, monkey's fare, — more kicks than 
halfpence. " I am not the first, and I shall not be 
"the last," said Socrates. And Plato playfully 
describes a public, hurt and angry, — kicking and 
biting those, who first turned them from shadows 
to the light of day. " I will kill thee and love thee, 
"after." The cross itself attests the fate of a re- 
former. Oxford, that stoned the prophets, now raises 
a stately cenotaph to her Marian martyrs. Lessing 
who now figures elsewhere, from the Walhalla to 
the Crystal Palace, was barely allowed to die in 
peace. The sting of the bee protects the hive, but 
the insect's life flows, with the wound which it 
inflicts. — Vitam impendere vero. Calumny pursued 
him with relentless rage ; even Semler, the liberal 
theologian, ("liberal with a vengeance," bishop 
Blomfield elegantly styles him,) satirized our author, 
as placed by the lord mayor of London in a lunatic 
asylum.* 



• << 



I am too well acquainted," Lessing answers, "with, the great 



XXXVI PREFACE. 

The Vienna gazette boldly taxed him with 
having received a Jewish bribe of a thousand ducats ; 
nor would it insert the refutation of his indignant 
friends. 

Baron Jacobi grieved over his friend as a pan- 
theist. Lessing, forsooth, had said in conversation : 
" Who knows, Baron, whether, hereafter, we shall 
" not be falling in that shower, or exhaling perfume 
" in yonder rose V And thus a jest was turned, by 
this proser, into an awful reality. The imputation 
broke the heart of the tender and affectionate Men- 
delsohn. Nor were there wanting fabricated death- 
bed scenes of recantation, — so consolatory to old 
women, of either sex. The plague-struck Pericles 
pointed, with a bitter smile, to the amulet, which 
the women had hung about his neck. Fear to 
give pain makes the hero " play the woman," at 
those moments. Lessing had said : " I perhaps shall 
'' tremble in my dying hour, but before my dying 
"hour I shall never tremble." Lessing knew well 
the tricks of pious fraud ; how the monks had foisted 
into the " Canterbury Tales," the " Parson's tale," 
of cant and recantation : — how a lying monument 
can change, like Lord Kenyon, Julian the apostate 
into Julian the apostle; and he vowed, in bitter- 
ness of spirit : "I will send for a public notary, 
" to testify, I do not die a Christian." 



'* Bedlam, in which we all live, to marvel if the Bedlamite majority, would 
" gladly shut me up in a little private madhouse of my own." 



PREFACE. XXXVll 

Sore is the trial, (Coleridge calls it duspathy, as 
the opposite to sympathy,) when false religion can 
turn the milk of human kindness, even in woman's 
breasts, to gall and wormwood. Lessing had to 
drink this bitter cup to the dregs. So strong was 
public feeling at one period, that the grandson of 
Eeimarus himself crossed the street, to avoid the 
heretic. Lessing's own words, when his boy, an 
infant a few days old, died: "I call him, without 
" a father's vanity, wise ; for he cast but one look on 
" this world, — and left it !" reveal to us, painfully, 
how himself longed for that " land of the leel," 
"where the wicked cease from troubling and the 
" weary are at rest." 

In a word, Lessing was the Phoenix of his own 
fable, "which appeared, at length, once in the 
" whole century.* The birds and beasts gaped, — 
" they stared at the prodigy, in a transport of admi- 
" ration. ' Unhappy bird', said the wisest of them, 
" c the only bird of his species ! he is doomed to a 
" ' life of solitude.' " 

" Truths would you teach, or save a sinking land ? 
" All fear, none aid you, and few understand. 
" Painful pre-eminence ! yourself to view 
" Above life's weakness, and its comforts too." 

Lessing's Nathan was the last song of the Swan, — 
most musical, most melancholy ; and he died singing 

* Campe, the lexicographer, applies to him. the words of Shakespeare : 
" He doth bestride the narrow world, 
" Like a colossus ; and we petty men 
" Walk under his huge legs." 

d 



XXXV111 PREFACE. 

it. u After that production," said his friend Men- 
delsohn, " he might well be content to die." Nature 
could not improve upon the work — and she broke 
the mould. " It breathes," says Miiller, " the air 
"of a pure, serene and happy climate, and a fra- 
" grance wafted from the blossoms on his grave." 



PKEFACE BY LESSING. 

( Unfinished.) 



BXBLIOLATRY. 



KaXo'v ye tov ttuvov, w 
Xpiare, (tol irpo <$0f.i<jjv Xarpevu), 
rtfitJov fjavreiov edpav. 



By Bibliolatry, I understand that veneration, 
which, at divers times, in divers manners, has been 
claimed for the Bible, and particularly for the books 
of the New Testament. 

I take Latry therefore not in the sense of the 
Catholic Church, according to which it denotes a 
veneration and a service, as they belong only to 
God ; and am far from having formed the whole 
compound word Bibliolatry after Idolatry. 

It is only because I hate long titles, and because 
under this every thing may pretty well be brought 
which I have to adduce in my defence against 
the distortion of an ignorant and malicious zealot, 
who would deprive me of the name of a Christian. 

I thought I might be allowed to prefer an 
equivocal brevity to a tedious periphrasis. Titles 
of books, like Christian names, are given not to 



xl PREFACE BY LESSING. 

characterize, but to distinguish. The lines quoted 
above are in the original not addressed to Christ, 
but to Phoebus.* Ion speaks in Euripides while 
sweeping the stairs before the temple of Apollo. 
I too do not consider it an inglorious work to 
sweep the threshold at least before the seat of 
divine inspiration. 

• Qoips. Euripid., Ion., Act I., v. 128—130. 



LETTEE I. 



A PARABLE 

Qua facilem ori paret holum. 

Etymologista Vetus. 

With a slight request and a parting letter in consequence, to the 
Rev. Mr. Goeze in Hamburg, 1778. 



Reverend Man ! 

I might say reverend friend, did I 
seek to prepossess the world slyly in my favour* 
by a public appeal to my friendships. 

But it is not my wont to raise prejudice against 
a neighbour, by proclaiming myself his friend. 

Yet justly might I style him friend, who has 
met me with obligations ; whom I have been led to 
know by means that would be distasteful to many ;* 
to whom I still feel obliged, were it only for this, 
that his watchman-voice has hitherto been pleased 
to spare my name. 

However, as I said, I no more seek to gain 
through my friends, than I wish them to lose 
through me. 



* By strictures from the Pulpit.— -Transl. 



Z LETTER I. 

Therefore, Venerable Sir ! only, be so good as to 
take the following trifle into some consideration. 
But specially I urge you, soon as possible, to de- 
clare your sentiments upon the subjoined request, 
not as a polemic only, but as an honest man and 
a Christian. 



©fie IJarafcle* 

A wise and energetick King of a very great 
Realme had in his capital Citie, a Palace of an 
Extent altogether immeasurable, and an Architec- 
ture altogether peculiar. 

Immeasurable was the Extent: because he had 
assembled about him therein, all the Assistants, 
or Instruments of his Government, whom he em- 
ployed. 

Peculiar was the Architecture: because it was, 
in some Degree, at variance with all received Eules ; 
but still it pleased and answered its Purpose. 

It pleased : chiefly through the Admiration, 
which Simplicitie and Grandeur always excite, when 
they seem not so much to need as to despise Rich- 
ness and Ornament. 

It answered its Purpose : through Durabilitie 
and Convenience. 

For many, many Years stood the entire Palace : 
it had the self-same Purity and Perfection which 
the Architects had imparted with their last Touch: 
When viewed from without, there was something 



LETTER I. 6 

unintelligible in it; but viewed from within, Light 
and Coherence everywhere. 

Those who conceited themselves to be Connois- 
seurs in Architecture were mightilie offended by its 
outer Sides, which were pierced by a few windowes 
only, here and there, large and small, round and 
square; but supplied in Compensation with many 
and divers Doors and Gates of manifold Form and 
Size. 

It was inconceivable, how sufficient Light could 
come through so few Windowes into so many 
Chambers. For it occurred to but very few, that 
the noblest Chambers received their light from 
Above. 

It was inconceivable, what purpose so many and 
manifold Entrances answered, since one grand Portal 
on each side would be more suitable and render 
the same Service. For it occurred to few that 
these many Entrances led those called into the 
Palace, the shortest and surest Way to the Spot 
where they might be wanted. 

And thus there arose among these self- constituted 
Criticks many a Dispute, most hotly maintained by 
those who had enjoyed the most imperfect View of 
the inner Part of the Palace. 

There was indeed something in the Matter, 
which seemed, at the first Glance, likely to make 
the Dispute very slight and short; but the Dispute 
grew thereby most complicated and its continuance 
most obstinate. People thought, to wit, that they 

B2 



4 LETTER I. 

possessed divers old Plans derived, as was said, from 
the original Architects of the Palace; and these 
Plans were found to be marked with Words and 
Cyphers of which the Language and Character were 
well nigh lost. 

Every one therefore explained for himself these 
Words and Cyphers after his own Pleasure. Every 
one constructed for himself out of these old Plans 
a new one to his own liking; in favour of which 
new one many a Man, here and there, oft allowed 
himself to be so transported, that he not only 
himself swore to it, but sometimes persuaded, some- 
times compelled others to swear to it. 

Few were those who said : " What are your 
" Plans to us ? This or another : they are all alike 
"to us. Enough, that we, every moment, feel, 
"that the most benign Wisdom fills the whole 
"Palace, and that Beauty, Order, and Blessedness 
"alone spread themselves thence over the whole 
"Land." 

These few — they were often badly off! For 
when, in merrie mood, they sometimes brought the 
Light a little nearer to one of those sundrie Plans, 
then were they denounced by those who had sworn 
to this Plan, as Incendiaries of the Palace itself. 
But they cared not, and thus became fit Associates 
of those who were working within the Palace, with 
neither Time nor Inclination to meddle with differ- 
ences, which to them were nought. 

Once upon a Time, — when the Contest about the 



LETTER I. 5 

Plans was not indeed adjusted, but only slumbering, 
— once upon a Time, about Midnight, there was 
suddenly heard the Voice of the Watchmen : " Fire ! 
"Fire in the Palace !" 

And what happened] Then upstarted every 
one from his Couch; and every one, as though the 
Fire were not in the Palace but in his own House, 
ran to fetch the most precious Article which he 
fancied he possessed, — to fetch his own Plan. " Let 
"us only save that!" everyone thought. "If the 
"Palace is burning, the Palace stands here as 
" essentially as there." And so everyone ran into 
the Street with his Plan, where, instead of hasting 
to the help of the Palace, they would first point 
out to one another in their own Plans whereabouts 
the Palace probably was on Fire. " Look, Neigh- 
bour! here it is on Fire! Here the Fire is best 
" encountered." — " Or rather here, Neighbour ; 
"here!" — "What have you both got in your 
"heads'? it is here, it is on Fire!" — "What danger 
"would there be, if it were on Fire there? But 
"it is certainly here that it is on Fire!" — "Let 
"who will extinguish it here. I shall not extin- 
guish it here!"— "And I not here!"— "And I 
"not here!" 

Through these busy Squabblers the Palace itself 
might have been consumed had it been on Fire. — 
But the affrighted Watchmen had taken a Northern- 
Light for a Conflagration. 



o letter i. 

The Bequest. 

A pastor is one thing, a librarian* another. 
Their names differ not more in sound, than do their 
duties and obligations in nature. In a word, I 
think, the pastor and the librarian stand in the 
same relation to each other as the shepherd and 
the botanist. 

The botanist wanders o'er hill and dale, he 
narrowly examines forest and field, in order to find 
out some little herb, to which Linnaeus has hitherto 
given no name. How does it gladden his heart if 
he finds one ! How little does he care whether 
this new plant be poisonous or not! He thinks 
if poisons are not useful (and who can say they 
might not be so?), yet, useful it is at least that 
the poisons be known. 

But the shepherd knows only the herbs of his 
sheepwalk; he values and cultivates those herbs 
alone which agree best with his sheep, and are 
most palatable to them. 

So it is with us, Eeverend Man ! — I am the guar- 
dian of library-treasures; and would not willingly 
be the dog in the manger :j" yet neither would I 
be the stable-boy who brings hay to the rack for 
every hungry horse. If I find something among 
the treasures entrusted to me, which I believe 
not to be known : I give notice of it. First in 
our catalogues; and then by degrees, as I find it 

* Lessing was librarian at Wolfenbuttel.— Tiiansl. 
f Per Huncl, der das Heu bewacht. 



LETTER I. I 

helps to fill up a gap, or set any matter right, by 
publishing it. I am quite indifferent whether one 
person pronounce it important, or another unimpor- 
tant ; whether it edify the one or scandalize the other. 
Useful and hurtful are as much relative ideas as great 
and small. 

You on the other hand, Venerable Sir, value 
literary treasures solely by their influence on your 
congregation, and would rather be too anxious than 
too supine. "What matters it to you, whether a 
thing be known or not known 1 ? if it might offend 
one of the least of those entrusted to your spiritual 
superintendence. 

Quite right ! I commend you for it, Reverend Sir. 
But while I commend you for doing your duty, 
don't you scold me for doing mine; — or, which is 
the same thing, for thinking I do it. 

You would "tremble before your dying hour, 
" if you had taken the least part in publishing the 
" fragments in question." 

I perhaps shall tremble in my dying-hour, but 
before my dying-hour I shall never tremble. Least 
of all for having done what all men of sense now 
wish the ancient librarians had done (if possible) 
with the writings of Celsus, Fronto, and Porphyry, 
in the libraries of Alexandria, Csesarea, and Con- 
stantinople. For the writings of Porphyry, says 
a man well informed on such matters, many a friend 
of religion in our day would willingly give in ex- 
change a pious Father of the Church. 



O LETTER I. 

I trust you, Reverend Sir, will never say ; " The 
" writings of those ancient foes of Christianity cer- 
" tainly ought to have been more carefully preserved. 
"But why keep those of the moderns, who after 
"seventeen hundred years could surely say nothing 
"newT— 

"Who knows that, without having heard them ? 
"Who of those who come after us will believe that 
without seeing it ? 

Besides, I am firmly of opinion that the world 
and Christianity will last so long, that with regard 
to religion, the authors of the first two thousand years 
after Christ will be as important to the world, as 
those of the first two hundred are to us. 

Christianity moves on with its own eternal gra- 
dual pace : nor do eclipses bring the Planets out 
of their path. But the sects of Christianity are the 
phases of the same, which could not subsist in other 
fashion, but by the stopping of the whole course of 
Nature, when Sun, Planets, and Observer continue 
at the same point. God protect us from this frightful 
stagnation ! 

Therefore, Reverend Man, censure me at least 
less severely, for having been so honest as to rescue 
from perishing, and bring to light, not only a very 
Christian work of Berengarius,* but also some very 
Anti- Christian fragments. 

However this is not the request, Venerable Sir, 

* In 1770 Lessing discovered and published Berengarius' answer to 
Lanfranc, "De corpore et sanguine Jesu Christi." — Transl. 



LETTER I. y 

which I have to make. Of some folks I request 
nothing which I have not a right to demand. My 
peculiar request is of a kind you cannot very well 
refuse to grant. You have done me injustice ; and 
nothing more nearly concerns an honest man than 
to repair an act of injustice involuntarily committed. 

Your wrong to me is this, — you have had the 
misfortune to explain a passage of mine utterly 
against the context. Your head was at the time 
more warm than clear. Let me illustrate this by 
a comparison. 

A waggoner finds his heavy laden waggon stuck 
fast in deep mire ; after many fruitless attempts to 
extricate himself, he says at last : " Since all the 
" cords break I must unload." Does this fairly imply 
that he was glad to unload, that he wilfully applied 
the weakest and most fragile cords, in order, with 
better grace, to be allowed to unload % If his em- 
ployer require the waggoner to make good all 
damage — damage not from without, but from faulty 
packing within, — would this be just? Eeverend 
Man, I am this waggoner, you this employer. 

I said, if all objections against the Bible, of 
which reason is so productive, cannot be removed, 
still in the hearts of those who have gained an 
inward feeling of its essential truths, Keligion would 
still remain undisturbed and uninjured. To support 
this, I wrote the passage doomed to suffer at your hands 
so unkind an expansion. I must have meant, it is 
made to appear, that no answer at all can be given 



10 LETTER I. 

to the objections against the Bible, and that it would 
be useless to desire to answer them. I must, it is 
made to appear, have advised the Theologian to 
take — the sooner, the better — his last unfailing re- 
fuge in the Christian, that thereby a weak but 
boastful enemy might the sooner gain the day. 

This, Venerable Sir, is not the true representation 
of my ideas. However you may not have intended 
so widely to misrepresent my views, it may be, 
confiding in your good cause, supposed to be attacked 
by me, you were too hasty — too precipitate. 

Those, Eeverend Man, who are the most easily 
led to act precipitately are not the worst men. They 
are as ready to own their rashness ; and such con- 
fession is often more instructive than cold, considerate 
infallibility. 

Accordingly, I expect from you, Eeverend Sir, 
that you will not fail, in one of the next articles of 
your Voluntary Contributions* to make a declaration, 
as good as voluntary, to the following purpose ; that 
after all there still remains a certain point of view 
in which my passage attacked by you may appear 
very harmless; that you overlooked this point of 
view, but that you no longer do so having been 
undeceived by me. 

Only such a declaration can put a stop to the 
suspicion, which you, Venerable Sir, seem 'wishful 
to spread as to my views. Only after such a decla- 

* A Religious Periodical conducted by the Rev. Mr. Goeze.-Tit.AN8L. 



LETTER I, 11 

ration can I be solicitous as to what it may further 
please you to record concerning me. 

Without such a declaration, Beverend Man, I 
must allow you to write — as I allow you to preach. 

The Parting Letter. 

My Eeyerend Sir, 

By means of the foregoing pacific sheets, I 
thought to have done with you. I rejoiced in 
thinking of the next Voluntary Contributions ', where 
your sacred fist would again wave over me the 
Christian Banner. 

But, while the Press was not speedy enough for 
me, or I for the Press,* I receive parts 61, 62, 63 of 
the aforesaid Contributions 3 — and am as it were 
annihilated ! 

Has the same man written this? How will 
posterity, into whose hands the Voluntary Contri- 
butions will no doubt come, explain so sudden a 
skip from white to black 1 

" Goeze," will posterity say, " was Goeze the 
" man, in the same breath to mumble between his 
" teeth soursweet compliments, and bawl out of his full 
"throat loud calumnies, towards one and the self- 
" same author 1 Should he act at once the cat and 
" the boar ] The cat who sneaks about the hot 
" porridge ; and the boar who blindly runs upon the 



* Lessing, it would seem, accounts for being behindhand in answering 
Goeze' s Contributions either by his own laziness 5 or the slowness of the 
Press. — Traxsl. 



12 LETTER I. 

" spearl That is incredible! In part 55 his zeal 
" is so measured, he so avoids names ; he names 
" nor sack nor ass, which his stick belabors : and all 
" at once, in part 61, it is Lessing by name from 
"beginning to end; must Lessing be pinched by 
" name, as often as he (Goeze) has the cramp in 
" his orthodox fingers I There, he hardly wishes to 
" move the water, and here, Splash ! Dash ! That 
"is inconceivable! There must be wanting, between 
"parts 55 and 61 of these precious sheets, those 
" which would account for this." 

So will posterity say, Venerable Sir. Yet what 
care we for posterity ] Perhaps it will not say so. 
Enough that yourself know best how vastly posterity 
will be mistaken ; and I merely touch on this chord 
in excuse to the now existing world, — as far as that 
world busies itself about you and me — in case my 
future tone towards the Rev. Mr. Goeze should have 
far more licence than I have hitherto allowed myself. 

For in truth, Venerable Sir, the obtrusive pinches 
with which you assail me, are gradually becoming 
too many ! Do not think I shall enumerate them : 
it would tickle you to perceive I felt them all. 
I simply tell you the result. I will not be 
decried as the man, less favourably disposed, than 
yourself, to the Lutheran Church. I feel that I am 
better disposed towards her than one, who would 
fain pass off, as holy zeal for God's cause, his own 
tender regards for a lucrative office. 

Have you, Reverend Man, the slightest spark of 



LETTER I. 13 

Luther's spirit ? — You ? who cannot even take a 
just survey of Luther's scholastic system ? — You ? 
why on the side where Luther's edifice sinks a little, 
you allow, with silent approbation, unwashed, nay 
perfidious hands, to screw it up even far above the 
builder's level! — You? why, you pelt with stones 
the honest — yes honest man, who, though unbidden, 
yet in sincerity, calls out to the men at the screw : 
" Screw no more there ! Take care the brickwork 
" don't give way !" 

And why stone the honest man? Because for- 
sooth an unknown architect's advice to take the 
building down altogether, was by this honest man — 
what ? — approved 1 no ! — seconded ] no ! — intended 
to be carried out, begun to be carried out % No, No ! 
only because the honest man thought he had no 
right to suppress it. 

O sancta simplicitas ! — But I am not yet come to 
that pass, where the poor man was barely allowed 
time to utter this. Let him who can and will, hear 
and judge ; first hear, first pass judgment upon us. 

Oh that he could do it, he whom I should most 
desire to have as my judge ! — Thou, Luther ! — Great 
man, ill understood! and by none less understood, 
than by the short-sighted wrong-heads, who, with 
your slippers in their hand, and an affected noisy 
zeal, saunter along the road macadamized by you ! — 
Thou hast released us from the yoke of tradition: 
who will release us from the more intolerable yoke 
of the letter 1 ? Who will bring us at length a 



14 



LETTER I. 



Christianity, such as thou would'st teach — such 
as Christ himself would teach, in our day ? 
Who 

But I forget myself ; and still more should I 
forget you, Eeverend Sir, if I on any utterance of 
this sort, should say confidentially to you: u Reverend 
" Sir, till that time come, which neither you nor 
"I may live to see — yet come it will, aye marry, 
"to a certainty, come it will — till that time come, 
" I say, would it not be better for the like of us 
" to be silent? That the like of us should be 
" quite passive ? What one of us would too much 
" check, the other might too much hurry on, so 
" that each might be only furthering the other's 
4 'views. What if, Reverend Sir, we were to allow 
"the battle, which I have still to fight out with 
"you, to be the first and last. I am willing not 
"to throw away another word upon you, except 
"what I have already thrown away." 

But no; you will not like that. Goeze has 
never yet allowed any opponent of his the last 
word; though he always takes care to have the 
first. He will consider as an attack, what I was 
obliged to say in my own defence. For the tilt- 
yard of the late Ziegra* must not descend to him 
in vain. 

I am sorry for it; for look you, Reverend Sir, 
when engaged with you I cannot but go against 

* Probably some doughty controversialist, but I have not any Con- 
versation-Lexicon at hand. — Tkaxsl. 



LETTER I. 15 

the grain ; and the furrows, which you would gladly 
force me to draw straight over consecrated ground, 
will I fear, become more and more crooked. 

Not that I would wish to exaggerate (even if 
possible) every malicious allusion of yours; every 
(with a "Deo Volente") poisonous bite; every 
comical burst of your tragical commiseration; every 
sigh, with gnashing of teeth, that, alas ! it is but 
a sigh;* every pastoral and dutiful hounding on 
of the higher temporal powers, wherewith you will 
henceforth lard and season your Voluntary Contri- 
butions. I am not so unreasonable as to ask any 
bird in the world for one feather other than he 
has. Besides spells of this kind have long since 
lost their credit. 

But there is one thing I shall not be able to 
bear — your pride; which allows no one reason and 
learning who employs them in other fashion than 
yourself. Specially will my bile be excited if you 
continue to treat, so like a schoolboy and poltroon, 
my anonymous friend, known to you as yet only 
by unconnected fragments. 

For, to balance the merits of man against man, 
— not cause against cause — this anonymous per- 
sonage was of such weight, that, in every branch 
of learning, seven Goeze's would not counter- 
balance that man's seventh part. For this mean- 
time, Keverend Sir, you may take my word. 

* And cannot inflict summary punishment*— or an excommunicating 
mdrandtha. — Transl . 



16 LETTER I. 

And so my knightly farewell* shall be short. 
" Write, Keverend Sir, and make others write, while 
" pen and paper last : I also write. If in the least 
" mat-ter, which concerns myself or my anonymous 
" friend, I allow you to be right, where you are not 
" right : then can I no longer hold a pen." 

• On leaving the tilt-yard for the present. — Transl. 



LETTERS II. AND III. 



These two letters are omitted. In them Lessing 
takes refuge from the fierce fire of Protestant Bib- 
liolaters, under the guns and forts of Patristic 
Traditionists — a dangerous expedient, as it again ex- 
poses us to a bondage, worse than Bibiiolatry itself. 

But Herr Lessing has so immersed himself in 
all this "reading never read," that he comes out 
encrusted with Monkish and Scholastic equivocations. 
We scarcely recognise the fair and candid Lessing; 
he has associated so long with those Arian and 
Athanasian " chimney-sweepers of the temple," that 
one could well believe he wore a black coat himself. 
— " Aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus" 

We may well take other ground. Are Protestant 
Bibliolaters consistent 1 Are there not many Provosts 
and Masters in Israel— richly endowed in order to 
defend the verbal inspiration of the Old as well as 
New Testament, — who enjoy their " otium cum 
" dignitate" as utterly ignorant of the very Hebrew 
vowel points, as were those "laziest of cattle," as 
Luther calls them, the Mitred Abbots ? 



LETTER IV. 



AXIOMATA, 

If such there be in these matters. 

— acumine pollentibus notionem prmdicati in notione suhjecti indivulso 
nexu cum ea cohcerentem pervidendi. 

Wolfii, Ph. r. 

Against the Rev. Mr. Goeze, in Hamburg, 1778. 



The sheet, or as many as there may be, which 
I sit down to write, might on this account become 
very troublesome to me, because I hardly know, 
for whom I write it. I only know against whom; 
and so little hope have I that it might possibly 
become for him, against whom it is directed, that 
I hardly venture to transform this hope into a wish. 

On one passage which, my conscience bears 
witness, I wrote with consideration and with a good 
intention, the Reverend Mr. Goeze, in Hamburg, 
has made remarks, printed in two different news- 
papers, which stigmatized me as an adversary of 
the Christian Religion. I will not repeat the pas- 
sage, as I have written it. And the less, as I wish 
to give a somewhat different order to the single 
positions, which I am supposed to have "planted 



LETTER IV. 19 

" there as mere axioms." It may be that my anta- 
gonist, through this slight alteration, will learn to 
understand me better; particularly when he finds, 
that his own objections have assisted me to explain 
myself more clearly. It may be that, through this 
slight alteration, my positions will become really 
better than they were before. For who knows not 
that Axiomata are positions, the words of which 
one needs but to understand, in order to perceive 
their truths 

At the outset the Reverend Gentleman is greatly 
startled, that neither the attacks nor the defences 
of the Christian Religion, hitherto made, altogether 
please me. He is startled; but if I can only in- 
duce him first to look steadily at the matter, which 
makes him so shy, then will he, as I hope, pass it 
by composed. If I wished to play the hypocrite, 
I need only so explain myself, that all the blame 
of my disappointed expectation should fall on the 
attacks on religion. 

That these are, without exception, altogether ill- 
directed, and wide of the mark, the Reverend 
Gentleman will willingly concede. Now suppose 
I were to say; "As the attack, so the defence. 
" How can the Theologian help it, that they would 
"not attack his good cause on any other side, or 
"with any better weapons'? When fortresses are 
" besieged from above, downwards ; then will people 
"begin to think of protecting them from above, 
" inwardly.'* 

C2 



20 



LETTER IV. 



However, I despise all subterfuges; I despise 
everything which looks like a subterfuge. I have 
said it, and I say it again: the defences of the 
Christian Religion, up to this day, are in respect 
to themselves, far from being written with all the 
attainments of intellect, — with all the love of truth, 
— with all the earnestness which the weight and 
dignity of the subject demand. This, my general 
assertion, arises from induction as complete, and ac- 
curately weighed as circumstances rendered possible. 

" Well! let this induction be brought before our 
"eyes!" my adversary exclaims in already trium- 
phant tone. My Eeverend friend, I should have 
much wished this demand had not been made to 
me in print. It is a true pulpit demand ; and you 
know right well how a demand of this sort is met. 
— Even by a demand. 

When I say, all quicksilver passes off in vapour 
over the fire, must I, in order to please him, who 
is not satisfied with the generality of my assertion, 
bring together all the quicksilver, which exists in 
nature, and make it pass off in vapour before his 
very eyes? I should, methinks, till I am enabled 
to do that, merely say : " Good friend, all the quick- 
" silver, which I have hitherto placed over the fire, 
"actually did pass off in vapour. If you know 
"of any that does not, bring it, that I may learn 
" the fact; and you shall have my thanks." 

To bring to the chemical test all the countless 
works written, even during this century, for the 



LETTER IV. 



21 



truth of the Christian Religion : what a demand ! 
If indeed the Reverend Gentleman meant it in 
earnest, — if he did not merely wish to jeer me by 
saying so, — if he did not merely wish to feast himself 
upon my embarrassment, — make me recant, or sub- 
mit me to an endless labor: well then, let him 
prove it by a mere trifle. This trifle is to cost 
him only one word. Namely; let him only name 
to me that work with which I am to make my 
first experiment of evaporation. Let him only 
name it to me; and I am ready. If it be one 
with which I am already acquainted, then I need 
have no apprehension. If it be one, with which 
I am not acquainted, and my experiment fail, so 
much the better. I willingly submit to endure a 
little shame for the sake of important information. 

Only one proviso I must make. He must not 
affect to believe, that he who doubts of certain 
proofs of a matter, doubts of the matter itself. 
The least hint — by pointing the finger in that direc- 
tion — is assassination. How can I help it, that in 
modern times they wished to raise secondary proofs 
to a certainty, and an evidence, which they positively 
could not have] How can I help it, that they 
would not leave the whole matter within the modest 
limits, where the earlier Theologians considered it 
to be sufficiently safe ? Or is the history of Dogmas 
so little known to the Eeverend Gentleman, that 
he knows nothing of these alterations ? Why 
should he censure a man dissatisfied with these 



22 LETTER TV. 

novel alterations ] In other respects, forsooth, he is 
no friend to Theological innovations. Why does he 
take these alone under his special protection against 
me 1 Is it because I have not in all cases expressed 
myself according to the language of the Theo- 
logical Schools, which is familiar to him ? I am an 
amateur in Theology, and not a Theologian. I have 
not been obliged to swear to any certain system. 
Nothing binds me to speak other language than 
my own. I pity all honest men, who are not so 
lucky, as to be able to say this of themselves.* 
But these honest men must not wish to cast the 
rope, with which they are fastened to the manger, 
about the horns of other honest men. Else my 
pity ceases : and I can do nothing but despise them. 
So much for the bugbear, which met the Reverend 
Gentleman at his entrance on the road. Now for 
the passage itself, which I feel compelled to rescue, 
not altogether in the same order, but in all its 
words and entire sense, from the misinterpretations 
of the Reverend Gentleman. The logical order of 
our thoughts is not always that, in which we com- 
municate them to others. But it is that, which 
the antagonist must above all things find out, if 
his attack is to be according to equity. And, 



* I therefore view with suspicion the novel church measure, of paying 
our Professors of Hebrew and Greek by her Canonries. It blinds the 
eyes and pinions the judgement. If my bread depended on the dirty 
notes of a provincial bank, I fear I should uphold its credit, though I 
thought it shaky. We must henceforth look to the London Professors 
for the independent testimony of Ancient Literature.— Transl. 



LETTER IT. 23 

therefore, the Reverend Gentleman ought to have 
begun with the third of my positions as follows : 



I. (3). 

The Bible manifestly contains more than 
belongs to religion. 

I need not repent of having written this. But, 
answer it as the Reverend Mr. Goeze, — I would 
not for the world! "In this position," he answers, 
"there lie two positions. Firstly; the Bible con- 
" tains that which belongs to Religion. Secondly: 
" the Bible contains more than belongs to Religion. 
" In the first position Mr. Aulic Councillor Lessing 
" admits that, which he has denied in the pre- 
" ceding one. If the Bible contains that which 
" belongs to Religion : then it contains Religion 
' ' itself, obj ectively . ' ' 

I am frightened ! Am I supposed to have denied 
that the Bible contains Religion ? I ? where have 
I done that] Immediately in the preceding one] 
Surely not by having said: the Bible is not Re- 
ligion ] Surely not by that ? 

My Reverend friend, if you have gone to work 
thus with all your antagonists! Is then to be and 
to contain one and the same thing % Are then 
these quite identical positions: namely, the Bible 
contains Religion, and the Bible is Religion ? Surely 
in Hamburg they will by no means call in question 
the difference between Gross and Nett There, 



24 LETTER IV. 

where so many articles have their fixed tare, will 
there not he allowed me a small tare on so costly 
an article as the Holy Scripture? Come, come, 
the Reverend Gentleman is surely not so little a 
man of business. For he continues : " The second 
"position may he admitted, when we make a distinction 
" between what essentially belongs to Religion, and 
"what to the elucidation and confirmation of the 
" essential part" 

Well! then we are bargaining about the gross. 
And how, if it contain useless package? — How, 
if there occur not a little in the Bible, which 
absolutely serves neither for the elucidation, nor 
the confirmation, even of the slightest tenet of 
Religion'? What others — good Lutheran Divines — 
have asserted of whole books of the Bible, I surely 
may be allowed to assert of single notices in this 
and that book? At least one must be a Rabbi, 
or one who can dress a text for the pulpit,* in 
order to rummage up a bare possibility or a quibble, 
whereby there could be brought into any relation 
to Religion the Yaimim of Anah, the Cherethites 
and the. Pelethites of David, "the cloak" which 
Paul forgot " at Troas," and a hundred other such 
things. 

The position then, that the Bible contains more 
than belongs to Religion, is true in an unlimited 
sense. It can indeed become infinitely more ad- 

* German, Ein Somilet. 



LETTER IV. 25 

vantageous to Religion by its proper application, 
than injurious by its misapplication. Misapplication 
is to be apprehended in all things; guard against 
it if you please. Only this should be done in a 
more fitting manner than in the following corollary 
of the Reverend Gentleman. 

"But should this position tend to the prejudice 
"of the Bible; then it is entirely powerless, just as 
"powerless as if I were to say: 6 Wolfs system of 
" c Mathematics contains Scholia, and these diminish 
" ' the value of it: " 

As was said, this position in my hands shall 
not do any injury to the Bible. It shall rather free 
it at once from numberless objections and scoffings, 
and re -instate it in its lost rights of ancient docu- 
ments, to which we are bound to pay reverence 
and forbearance. 

To come next to your example, Eeverend Sir, 
I am more satisfied with it, than you think. The 
Scholia in Wolf's Elements of Mathematics do not 
certainly lessen the value of the same. But by 
being there they introduce things not demonstrated. 
Or think you the Scholia just as certain as the 
Theorems? Not but that Scholia may be demon- 
strated : only they do not require it here. It would 
be a waste of demonstration, if all the trifles, 
which might or might not be brought into a 
Scholion, were furnished with it. A similar waste 
of Inspiration is of just as little utility, but it 
infinitely more offends. 



26 LETTER IV. 

II. (4). 

It is mere Hypothesis, that the Bible is 
equally infallible in this additional matter. 

Is it not % But what then % " Indisputable Truth" 
Indisputable % which has been so often disputed ! 
which even at this day is disputed by so many ! 
by so many who both are, and would be considered 
Christians. Not indeed Wittenberg Lutheran Chris- 
tians — not indeed Christians by the Grace of Calov — 
but still Christians and even Lutheran Christians by 
the Grace of God. 

Suppose however Calov and Goeze were right. 
The latter at least adduces so excellent a dilemma. 
" Either" says he, " at least approved by God, or it 
"is not. In the Jir st place, it is just as infallible, as 
" the essential. But if the last be assumed, then the 
"first also loses its certainty" 

If this dilemma is right : then it must also hold 
good, if I, instead of "additional matter," put any 
other Subject, of which the same double Predicate 
seems to hold good. For instance: 'That which 
' is morally bad has either come into existence 
4 through God, at least been approved by Him, or 
' it has not. In the first case, it is just as divine, 
4 and therefore just as good as the absolutely good. 
6 But if the last be assumed, we cannot know whether 
' God has created and approved of the morally good. 
' For Bad is never without Good, and Good never 
'without Bad.' 



LETTER IV. 27 

What does my reader think ? shall we retain both 
dilemmas? or reject both] I determine for the 
last. For how] if God had conducted himself in 
the act of Inspiration with regard to the human 
additions, which Inspiration did not render impos- 
sible, — just as in the act of creation with regard to 
the morally bad ? How ] if He after the one and 
the other miracle had once taken place, had left that, 
which these miracles had produced, to its natural 
course ] What harm does it do, that in this case the 
limits, between human additions and revealed truths, 
could no longer be so precisely determined ] Surely 
the line of demarcation between the morally bad, and 
the morally good, is just as little defineable. But 
have we on that account no perception at all of good 
or bad ] Would no revealed truths at all on that 
account be distinguished from human additions] 
Has then revealed truth no inward marks at all? 
Has its immediately divine origin left behind no 
trace on it, or in it, except the historical truth, 
which it has in common with so many petty narra- 
tives ] 

Thus I might make this, and many other objec- 
tions to the Keverend Gentleman's syllogism. But 
he wishes to prove, not so much by syllogisms, as 
by similes and texts. 

And will indeed these texts be indisputable ] Would 
that they were so ! Gladly would I forget that 
everlasting circle, whereby the infallibility of a book 
is proved from a passage in the same book ; and the 



28 LETTER IV. 

infallibility'of the passage, from the infallibility of the 
book. 

But they are also so far from indisputable, that 
I must think the Reverend Gentleman has searched 
out the most doubtful, in order to reserve the more 
important for a better opportunity. 

When Christ says of the Scripture, " it bears 
" witness of him" did he mean to say that it bears 
witness only of him? How do these words imply 
the homogeneousness of all Biblical books, as well in 
relation to their contents as their inspiration ? Could 
not the Scripture bear witness of Christ just as well, 
if that only had been inspired, which is distinguished 
as express words of God or the Prophets \ 

And the iraaa ypa^y of Paul ! — 

I need not remind the Reverend Gentleman, he 
must first satisfy me with regard to the true expla- 
nation of this passage, before he proceeds so unhesi- 
tatingly to make use of it. Another construction 
gives to the words of Paul a quite different sense ; 
and this construction is as grammatical, — as much in 
unison with the context, — has in its favour as many 
Theologians, old and new, as the construction ap- 
proved of in the most common Lutheran lesson-books ; 
so that I cannot see at all, why we must absolutely 
abide by this latter. Luther himself in his version 
has not so much followed the latter as the former.* 
He has read no /cat,; and it is sad enough if through 

* 2 Timothy in. 16, rendered by Luther: Denn alle Schrift von Gott 
eingegeben ist niitze zur Lehre, &c. 



LETTER IV. 29 

these variations — according as this Km is taken or 
omitted — the main passage for settling all theology 
becomes so utterly tottering. 

Lastly the ;: steadfast prophetic word" ! 

Whence the proof, that under the prophetic word 
all historical words are also understood ] Whence ? 
the historical words are the vehiculum of the prophetic 
word. But a vehiculum neither has, nor ought to 
have the power and nature of the medicine. What 
objection has the Eeverend Gentleman to this repre- 
sentation'? That it is not his own, — Wittenberg 
representation: that I know. But if this be all, 
Germany was to learn, by two newspapers: why 
not make the matter more easy for himself and me ] 
Why not proclaim at once, that my whole passage 
flatly contradicts the compendiums of the Wittenberg 
Orthodoxy % Granted — with all my heart ! could 
I have answered as shortly. 

in. (i). 

The Letter is not the Spirit, and the Bible 
is not Religion. 

If it be true, that the Bible contains more than 
belongs to Religion, who can forbid me to call it — 
as a book which contains both — the Letter ; while 
I assign to the better part of the same Book, — which 
either refers to, or is itself Religion, — the name of 
the Spirit? 

Even while assuming the inward testimony of 
the Holy Ghost this appellation is appropriate; For 



30 LETTER IY. 

since this witness more or less manifests itself, in 
those books and passages of Scripture only, which 
more or less aim at our spiritual improvement : what 
more reasonable than to call such books and passages 
of the Bible, the spirit of the Bible ? Nay more. 
It would approach, methinks, to blasphemy to main- 
tain the Power of the Holy Ghost to be displayed 
as efficaciously in the Mosaic Genealogy of Esau's 
descendants, as in our Lord's Sermon on the Mount, 
recorded by Matthew. This difference between the 
Letter, and the Spirit of the Bible is in reality the 
same, as others — good Lutheran Divines — have long 
since made, between Holy Writ and the Word of 
God. AVhy has not the Reverend Mr. Goeze first 
assaulted these, before he imputes it as a crime to 
a poor layman to have trodden in their steps ? 

IV. (2.) 
It follows, objections against the Letter and 
against the blble, are not, on that account, ob- 
JECTIONS AGAINST THE SPIRIT, AND AGAINST BeLIGION. 

A consequence certainly shares the nature of the 
grounds whence deduced. That is partly demon- 
strated, partly proved. If objections against inci- 
dental elucidations of the main principles of the 
Christian Religion, are no objections against the 
main principles themselves : still less can objections 
against Biblical matters, which not so much as 
incidentally elucidate Beligion, be objections against 
Religion. 



LETTER IV. 31 

I have now only to answer the case put by the 
Eeverend Gentleman. Yes, if " a country's consti- 
" tution"* strictly contain neither more nor less than 
the " order of a country"* then that subject who 
wantonly objects to the constitution of a country, 
wantonly attacks the order of a country. But to 
what end, in that case, these very different denomi- 
nations ? why not call one another the order of 
a country, or the constitution of a country] The 
difference in name implies some difference in them- 
selves. As for perfect Synonyms — there are none. 
But if one differ from the other, to attack one is 
not necessarily to attack the other. Be the circum- 
stance ever so slight, which gave rise to the twofold 
denomination, still the objection may concern this 
slight circumstance alone ; and what the Eeverend 
Gentleman so tauntingly calls Antithesis is complete 
justification. I will explain myself by an example 
which is quite familiar to him: The collection of 
the Hamburg Laws by Mr. Syndic Klefeker, when 
finished, will contain the most complete and certain 
constitution of the city of Hamburg, — might also 
bear that title. Suppose then, it bear that title — 
can I make no objection to this work without setting 
myself in opposition to the authority of the Hamburg 
Laws? Might not my objection relate to the his- 
torical introduction, prefixed by Mr. Klefeker to 
each class of Laws 1 Have these historical intro- 

* These were the absurd expressions of Goeze. — Transl. 



32 LETTER IV. 

ductions acquired the force of Laws, because printed 
in one volume with them] Whence does the 
Eeverend Gentleman know that the historical books 
of the Bible are not something like these intro- 
ductions? — books which as little need God's inspi- 
ration, or even approval, as these introductions call 
for the peculiar protection of the Hamburg Council 
and Corporation. Enough that all the Archives of the 
city stood open to Klefeker. If he has not used 
them with sufficient care : then let another do better ; 
and that is all. It would be an abuse, — a needless 
squandering of legislative power, if two things so 
different, as law, and history of law, were invested 
with like authority. 

V. (5). 

There was Religion before there was a Bible. 

Against this the Eeverend Gentleman says : " But 
"surety not before there teas a Revelation." What 
he means by this is, to me, utterly inconceivable. 
Yes, a revealed Religion cannot exist before it has 
been revealed, but it can exist before it has been 
written down. All I would say is this : there was 
religion ere the least part thereof was committed to 
writing,— before one single book of that Bible existed, 
which is now made equivalent to Religion itself. 
To what purpose then this cross-grained question, 
which might make confusion in my ideas ? I have no 
answer to give. 



LETTER IV. 



33 



VI. (6). 

Christianity existed before the Evangelists 
and Apostles had written. A pretty long time 
elapsed before the first of them wrote ; and 
a very considerable time, before the whole 
Canon was completed. 

"All this," says the Reverend Gentleman, "I 
"can grant the editor." — -Can? why only canf— 
The Reverend Gentleman must 

But if he must grant this, he will also grant, 
that the orally revealed Christianity existed much 
earlier than the written ; that without being written 
it can subsist and spread. More than this I do 
not want, and I know not at all why he meets me 
with the question : " Was then Christianity exist- 
" ing, before Christ and the Apostles preached ?" 

This question is meant to render my position 
useless for its object; which object the following 
position contains. We shall see. 

Here I should much like, by way of preliminary* 
to ask one or two questions; merely to inform 
myself,-— merely in order to seize the Reverend Gen* 
tleman's whole meaning. — " If while Christ and his 
"apostles preached, as long as the extraordinary 
" gifts of the Holy Ghost were working in churches, 
"the propagation of the Christian Religion could 
" be better maintained by means of oral instruction, 
" than by writings :"* did the use of writings 

• Those who have read Dr. Conyers Middleton's •'Free Enquiry" must 
take the following as a mere argumentum ad hominem. — Tkansl, 

D 



34 LETTER IV. 

first begin when these extraordinary gifts ceased, or 
did it begin earlier? If it began earlier, and it is 
undeniable that these gifts did not cease to exist 
at the same time with the Apostles, but continued 
for centuries : did, during that period, the gifts 
derive their evidence from the writings, or the 
writings from the gifts? The former supposition 
has no sense; and if the latter were the case, are 
not we very badly off, that the same writings, which 
the first Christians believed on the evidence of the 
gifts, we are bound to believe without this evidence % 
But if, on the contrary, the use of the writings did 
not begin sooner than when the gifts of miracles 
ceased: whence do we derive the proof, that the 
writings have not supplied already, as much as 
they were intended to do, the place of the gifts 
of miracles ? 

And yet it is clear from history that this is 
actually the case. It may be proved, that while 
the gifts of miracles, — particularly the immediate 
illumination of the Bishops, — existed, much less 
was made of the written word. It was even a crime 
to be disposed to believe the Bishop, only upon 
reference to the written word. And that not with- 
out solid reason. For the i^fyvTos Beopea t^? SiSaxv* 
which was in the Bishops, was the very same which 
had been in the Apostles ; and when Bishops quoted 
the written word, they quoted it indeed in con- 
firmation, but not as the source of their thoughts. 

This again nearly brings me back to the object, 



LETTER IV. 



35 



with which I have premised the position now in 
hand, and the next. To the conclusion, namely : 

VII. (7). 

However much value may be attached to these 
writings; still the whole truth of the Christian 
Religion cannot possibly depend upon them. 

That is, if it be true, that the Religion of the 
Old and New Testament was already revealed, a 
considerable time before the least part of it was 
composed in writing ; and a still longer time existed 
before all the books were ready, which now rank 
in the Canon of the Old and New Testament : then 
surely Revealed Religion must be conceivable with- 
out these books. I say, without these books. I do 
not say, without what these books contain. He who 
makes me say this, instead of that, makes me say 
nonsense, in order to have the great and saintly 
merit of refuting nonsense. Again and again I say : 
without these books. And indeed, far as I know, 
no orthodox person has as yet maintained, that Re- 
ligion has been originally revealed, for the first 
time, in one of these books, and gradually grown 
up just as the other books have been added. On 
the contrary learned and reflecting Divines unani- 
mously admit, that sometimes more, sometimes less 
of Revealed Religion has been in these books oc- 
casionally only preserved. — This more or less would 
have been still true, before it was preserved bc- 

d2 



36 



LETTER IV. 



casionally in writing : and are we to consider it 
true now, only because preserved in writing ? — 

Here indeed the Reverend Gentleman tries to 
help himself out by a distinction : The truth of 
Eeligion, he pretends, may be one thing, and our 
conviction of this truth another. " The truth of 
"the Christian Religion,'* says he, u by all means 
"rests on itself: it subsists on its agreement with 
" the Attributes and the Will of God, and on the 
u historical certainty of the facts,* upon which its 
"doctrines are partly founded. But our conviction 
" of the truth of the Christian Religion rests wholly 
" and solely upon these writings." But if I rightly 
understand these words: the Reverend Gentleman 
either says something very unphilosophical, or he 
refutes himself, and is entirely of my opinion. It 
may be also that he was compelled to express 
himself so unphilosophically, in order not to appear 
too plainly to be of my opinion. For let us only 
consider! If the truth of the Christian Religion 
partly, — (this partly indeed he has not expressly 
written, but his meaning necessarily demands it), — 
if it, I say, rests partly on itself, that is, on its 
agreement with the Attributes and the Will of God, 
and partly on the historical certainty of the facts, upon 
which some of its doctrines are grounded : does there 
not arise, out of this two-fold ground, a two-fold con- 
vincing power also % Has not every individual ground 
its own convincing power for itself? What need 

• Factorum in the pedantic original of Goeze.— Transl. 



LETTER IV. 37 

has one of the two to borrow its convincing power 
from the other? Is it not indolent levity, to set 
down the convincing power of the one to the credit 
of the other ? Is it not light-minded indolence, to wish 
to extend the convincing power of the one to both 1 
Why do things, necessarily believed true, — because 
in accordance with the Attributes and the Will 
of God, — require for their reception the historical 
proof of other things, connected in time and space 1 

Suppose it quite true, that the Biblical books 
prove all the facts on which the Christian Doctrines 
are partly founded : prove facts — this books can 
do; and why should they not be able to do so? 
Enough that the Christian doctrines are not all 
founded upon facts. Some are founded, it is ad- 
mitted, upon their intrinsic truth ; and how can 
the intrinsic truth of any position depend on the 
authority of the book, in which it has been pro- 
pounded % This is manifest contradiction. I cannot 
sufficiently admire one question, which the Reverend 
Gentleman proposes, with the certain assurance, " one 
answer" alone is possible. " If the books of the New 
"Testament had not been written, and had not 
" reached us, would there indeed," he asks, " have 
" remained in the world a trace of that which 
"Christ has done and taught/?" — God forbid, I 
should ever think so meanly of the precepts of 
Christ, as to venture to give this question the 
straightforward answer no ! I would not, though 
an angel from heaven dictated it, much less when 



38 LETTER IV. 

a Lutheran clergyman would put it into my mouth. — 
Everything which happens in the world, though 
man cannot always point to them, must leave traces 
behind : and would thy precepts only, divine Friend 
of Man, which thou didst command to preach, not 
write, have no effect, when only preached, to make 
men recognise their origin ? Would thy words be 
words of life, only when transformed into dead 
letters ] Are books the only way to enlighten and 
improve, is oral tradition nothing'? if subject to 
a thousand falsifications, intentional or otherwise, 
are not books so? Might not God, by the same 
display of his immediate power, have guarded oral 
tradition against falsifications, as we say he does 
the books 1 Alas for the man, Almighty God ! — 
the would be preacher of thy word, who boldly 
asserts, that Thou, to attain thy object, had'st but 
the one way, which it has pleased thee to make 
known to him ! Alas for the Theologian, who, with 
the exception of this single way, which he sees, 
flatly denies all other ways, which he does not see. 
May 1 never, oh Good God, be so orthodox — so 
presumptuous ! 

VIII. (8.) 

If there was a period, in which the Christian 
Religion had already been so extensively dif- 
fused, in which it had already gained so many 
souls, in which nevertheless not a letter had 

BEEN PENNED OF THAT, WHICH HAS COME DOWN TO US, 



letter iv. 39 

then it must also be possible, that everything 

which the Evangelists and Apostles have written 
might again be lost, and yet the religion taught 
by them might still subsist. 

It is not parody and burlesque, — it is in heartfelt 
earnestness, I turn, in part, the words of the 
Reverend Gentleman against himself, and say : 
1 With all the esteem, which I have for the clever- 
'ness and merits of the Reverend Gentleman, in 
'other respects, about Theological literature, I still 
' cannot refrain from declaring, that what he ob- 
' serves against this position is most dangerous 
' heterodoxy \ or most malicious slander' — Let him 
choose ! indeed both are at his service. 

In the first instance then : his observations with 
regard to slander. — " A palpable sophism !" he cries. 
Aye ! palpable* to one whose hands are more quick 
of perception than his brains. " For," says he, 
" instead of, ' not a letter had been penned, &c.' 
" put ' not a word had been preached, &c.' then 
" the falsehood of the same will be clear to our eyes." 
— Excellent! — Where is the author upon whom 
I will not sow on a Sophism — a blasphemy — if I 
am allowed to thrust upon him other words instead 
of his own % Other 1 merely other words 1 If the 
candid — the Christian and Reverend gentleman had 
let it rest there ! But he thrusts upon me, instead 
of my words, which have some sense if not a true 

• Leasing plays on the German " handgreiflich," used by Goeze. 



40 LETTER IV. 

one, words which have absolutely no sense. I say : 
the Christian Religion existed before any part of 
the Christian Eeligion had been written. I am 
made to say: the Christian Religion existed, before 
the Christian Religion had been preached or re- 
vealed. That is, existed before it existed. Have 
I then escaped from Bedlam, that I should say 
or write any such thing ? 

The Reverend Gentleman hereupon proceeds 
to impute to me doubts which I never felt. And 
why ? Is it that the readers of his pages may 
believe that I have these doubts % — Charming ! Very 
becoming to his cloth ! 

Again the question is broached ; " How can we 
" at present know the precepts and acts of Christ 
" and his Apostles ?" answer is returned : " Solely 
" by the writings of the Evangelists and Apostles.'' 
Against this word " solely" I must again secure 
myself: and I add, the majority of Christians admit 
his "solely" as little as I do. Or are the Roman 
Catholics not Christians ? am I no Christian if, in 
this, I side with them ? Do I thus absolutely dis- 
pense with the whole Christian Religion? 

And here the Heterodoxy of the Reverend 
Gentleman begins. How] the Christian Religion 
itself be lost, if the writings of Evangelists and 
Apostles were ? What ! Has no sure system been 
drawn from these writings which might be pre- 
served in others? Is he no Christian who believes 
the system, when so derived? Does no sick man 



LETTER IV. 41 

recover, but he, who swallows medicine together 
with box] 

Review my whole object in the passage, so 
offensive to the Reverend Gentleman. I would re- 
duce to their true insignificance objections against 
the less important parts of the Bible. And it is 
with this object that I say, he, whose heart is 
more Christian than his head, should not care a 
jot for these cavils ; because he feels what others 
are content to think ; because he, if things came 
to the worst, could do without all the entire Bible. 
He, who is confident of victory, leaves the forts 
behind and captures the country. But the Theo- 
logian is the coward soldier, who, by knocking 
his head against every frontier fortress, scarce gains 
a sight of the country at all. 

A story to the point!— 

At the commencement of the last century, a 
deprived Lutheran Preacher of the Palatinate, 
wished to betake himself, together with his family, 
children of both sexes — to one of the Colonies of 
British America. The ship in which he was cross- 
ing over was wrecked on one of the small, unin- 
habited Bermuda Isles ; and almost all the ship's 
company, with the exception of the Preacher's 
family, were drowned. The Preacher found this 
island so pleasant, so healthy, so rich in all, which 
contributes to the support of life, that he readily 
made up his mind to close the days of his pilgri- 
mage there. 



42 LETTER IV. 

The storm had driven a small chest on the 
shore, in which there was found, with all sorts of 
things for his children, a Lutheran Catechism also. 
This Catechism, in the complete want of all other 
books, naturally enough, became a very valuable 
treasure. He continued to instruct his children 
from it, till he died. The children again instructed 
their children from it ; and died. Two years ago 
an English ship with a Hessian army-chaplain on 
board, was driven on the same island. The army- 
chaplain, — I could cite his own letters — went on 
shore with some sailors to take in fresh water, and 
was not a little astonished, to find himself at once, 
in a quiet, smiling valley, among a naked, cheer- 
ful, small population, who spoke German ; a German 
in which he thought he heard nothing, but phrases 
and turns borrowed from Luther's catechism. 

This excited his curiosity, and lo ! he found, 
this small population not only spoke with Luther, 
but also believed with Luther — believed as ortho- 
doxly as ever did army-chaplain. A few trifles 
excepted. The Catechism had been naturally worn 
out in the century and a-half, and they had nothing 
more left of it, than the little boards of the bind- 
ing. " In these little boards," said they, " is 
" contained all which we know." — " Has been con- 
" tained, my dears !" said the army-chaplain. " Is 
"contained, — contained still' ' said they. "We our- 
" selves indeed cannot read — hardly indeed know 
" what it means. — But our fathers have heard their 



LETTER IV. 43 

" fathers read therefrom, and these last knew the 
"man, who cut out the little boards. The man 
" was called Luther, and lived shortly after Christ." 

Before I proceed with the story, Reverend Sir: 
were these good little folks Christians, or were 
they not? They had a lively faith that there is 
a Supreme Being ; that they were poor sinful 
creatures ; that this Supreme Being has taken 
measures, notwithstanding, to make them eternally 
happy, after this life, through another, equally ex- 
alted Being. — Reverend Sir, were these kind folks 
Christians, or were they not? 

You must of necessity say they were not, for 
they had no Bible. — Merciful God ! Unmerciful 
Priest ! — No ! I'll tell you no more of this dear, 
cheerful, happy, little party. Let us rather chat a 
moment longer upon a subject, concerning which, 
it is far more pardonable to have no correct ideas. 
The Reverend Gentleman wishes to prove, that, 
" my position, moreover, manifestly contradicts ex- 
" perience and history." But what he adduces on 
that head is so poor, so superficial, that at most 
he should allow himself such flourishes only in his 
sermons. Just listen : " From the ninth century," 
says he, "till the commencement of the fifteenth, 
"there was an interval, in which the writings of 
" the Evangelists and Apostles had well nigh been 
"lost. Who, save a few learned men knew the 
" Bible ? It remained buried in the cloisters — in 
"Manuscripts and Translations — till the invention 



44 LETTER IV. 

" of printing." Why fewer copies of the New Tes- 
tament, from the ninth to the fifteenth, than from 
the fifth to the ninth century] Why fewer from 
the fifth to the ninth, than from the first to the 
fifth ] Just the reverse ; the Codices of the New 
Testament multiplied with the course of time. 
They were most scarce in the first and second 
century, — so scarce that whole churches possessed 
but a single codex, held under lock and key by 
the Presbyters, and not to be read, without their 
special permission. Will he venture to prove the 
same, as to the period he quotes'? I think, in 
my poor way, that in this period there were more 
copies of the Bible in Germany alone, than during 
the first two centuries, in the whole world; ex- 
cept perhaps of the original text of the Old 
Testament. Or would he give us to understand, 
that with the ninth century they began to shuffle 
the Bible out of the hands of the people ? He 
must do so ; for he goes on : " the great mass 
" heard nothing more of the Bible, than what the 
"Roman clergy told them, that is, only what did 
"not prejudice the clerical interest. How stood 
"the Christian Religion at that time with the mass] 
" Was it more than a Heathenism with slight 
"changes'?" All this took place, in truth, before 
the ninth century. Before that time therefore, 
Religion, if it could subsist only by the immediate 
use of the Bible, must have become corrupt. Cut 
assentiunt, I may add from Irenaeus, multce gentes 



LETTER IV, 



45 



barbarorum, eorum qui in Christum credunt, sine 
charta et atramento scriptam habentes per Spiritum 
in cor dibits suis salutem. Lastly, if Religion de- 
clined solely through lack of Scripture, why did 
it not recover when printing made copies abundant. 
But has the Romish church given up one of her 
old dogmas in consequence I Are there no Conyers 
Middletons* who still regard her as a Heathenism 
very slightly changed? I am certain the Reverend 
Gentleman himself is of this edifying opinion. — 
But the Reformation ? — this we owe at least to the 
full use of the Bible 1 — Even this may be doubted. 
It was not so much that men began to use their 
Bibles, — as that they ceased to regard Tradition. 
Meanwhile this unrestricted use of the Bible has 
been the cause of Socinianism, quite as much as 
of the Reformation. 

Thus, at least, I think, — caring little for the 
Reverend Gentleman's wonder, — not even wonder- 
ing at it ! May heaven long preserve us in the 
same relation, — he wondering, and I not! 

IX. (9). 

Religion is not true, because the Evangelists 
and Apostles taught it: but they taught it 
because it is true. 

Every well discerned distinction may be brought 
to an Antithesis by one who is tolerably master 



* See his " A letter from Rome, showing an exact conformity be- 
tween Popery and Paganism," 1729. 



46 LETTER IV. 

of his own language. But Antithesis rests not always 
on such clear discernment; — our friends the poets 
often indulge in the summer lightning of wit: and 
fancy it the sharp and shattering flash of keen 
clear-sightedness. The name Antithesis, therefore, 
has grown somewhat suspicious. This is 'grist to 
'the miir with gentlemen, who feel a kind of 
natural antipathy to all clear and keen intellect, — 
specially if not dressed in their usual language. 
"Antithesis! Antithesis!" they cry. And they have 
refuted everything. 

"This Antithesis too proves nothing!" says the 
oracular Reverend Gentlemen : " For if the Evan- 
"gelists and Apostles are men, who spake and 
" wrote, as moved by the Holy Ghost : then the 
" Christian Religion is true, because the Evangelists 
" and Apostles, or more properly, God himself has 
" taught it. The second position stands there quite 
"idly." Well then! I must heap up the measure 
of my sins, and prop one Antithesis by another. 
Even what God teaches is not true, because God 
is pleased to teach it: but God teaches it, because 
it is true. Does the second position stand here also 
idly ? — Yes : if we knew not how charming an idea 
these Gentlemen have about the Will of God ! that 
God can will something, merely because he wills 
it. Even this might be said in a certain sense of 
God. I hardly know how words can express their 
nonsense. 



LETTER IV. 47 

X. (10). 
The Scriptural Traditions must be explained 

FROM THE INTERNAL TRUTH OF EeLIGION .' AND NO 

Scriptural Traditions can give to it any internal 
truth, if it have none. 

The first word the Reverend Gentleman applies 
to this is : " Good ! " I was, of course, glad. How- 
ever a " But" follows this " Good" and the oddest 
But in the world. No longer is aught u good," not 
even what was so called from his own mouth. 
Above, himself informed us, the internal truth of 
the Christian Religion rests on its harmony with 
the attributes of God; now, he no longer knows 
a word of this internal truth, but either merely 
places the Hermeneutic truth in its stead, or, at 
all events, declares it to be the only proof of the 
internal truth. As if this needed a proof! As if 
the internal truth ought not rather to be the proof 
of the Hermeneutic truth ! 

List! Oh list! I will reduce the pretended 
refutation on the part of the Reverend Gentleman, 
and my answer, to a sort of Dialogue, which might 
be called the Pulpit-Dialogue. Namely, I interrupt 
the Reverend Gentleman : but the Reverend Gentle- 
man does not consider himself as interrupted. He 
goes on talking, without troubling himself, whether 
or not our words chime in. He is wound up, and 
must run down. Therefore, 



48 LETTER IV. 

A Dialogue and no Dialogue. 

He. " Good ; but the man who would explain 
"to me the Scriptural traditions from the internal 
" truth of Religion, must first convince me, that 
" he himself has a right well-grounded conception of 
" the internal truth of the same, — " 

I. First? Why first? While he does the one 
he surely does the other also. While he explains 
to me the internal truth of a revealed sentence, 
(I say explains , not merely wishes to explain:) he 
surely sufficiently proves, that he himself has a right 
conception of this internal truth. 

He. " — and that he does not form for himself 
" an image of it, which suits his own views. " 

I. If his views have no intrinsic goodness : then 
the Religious dogmas, which he wishes to impart 
to me, cannot have any intrinsic truth either. In- 
trinsic truth is no nose of wax,* which every rogue 
can make as prominent as he likes, according to 
the face which he wants. 

He. " But whence will he obtain his knowledge 
" of the internal truth of the Christian Religion, — " 

* How the letter of the Bible may be made a nose of wax, Granville 
Sharp may show, in his " New proofs of Christ's Divinity, derived from 
"the uses of the Article in the Greek Testament." As if this Greek 
was highly finished, pure, and correct diction, instead of being a 
hybrid 

"thing, one knows not what to call 
Its generation's so equivocal :"*- 

made up of ungrammatical patois, — Hebraisms, — Syro-Chaldaisms, — 
Rabbinisms,— Persisms, — Latinisms, &c. Porson quizzed Sharp's letters, 
under the name of Gregory Blunt. 



LETTER IV. 49 

I. Whence obtain its internal truth 1 Why, out 
of itself. Indeed it is on that account that it is 
called internal truth ; that truth, which stands in 
need of no external credentials. 

He. " — except from the written traditions, or 
" from the writings of the Evangelists and Apostles, — " 

I. What must we take from these 1 Internal 
truth, or our first historical knowledge of this truth % 
The former would be as strange, as if I should 
feel compelled to hold, as true, a geometrical theorem, 
not on account of its demonstration, but on account of 
its having a place in Euclid. That it has a place 
in Euclid, may be a well grounded prejudice in 
favor of its truth; as much as you like. But it 
is one thing, to believe the truth from prejudice, 
and another, to believe it on its own account. 
Practically, perhaps, both may lead to the same 
end, but is it, on that account, the same case 1 

Again, has the New Testament, through seventeen 
centuries, never diffused itself— never and nowhere 
flowed over into other writings, in its original 
purity and wholesomeness %■ Must all Christians 
draw from itself alone* — never use nearer, more 
accessible channels, into which it has overflowed? 
Surely this, this only is the question here. — If he 
may, why may not the writings of the Evangelists 
and Apostles, without injury to him, become lost? 
Why not consider them as lost, when assailed with 
objections to passages, which alter not the essentials 
of Religion? If no complete, unerring system has, 

E 



50 LETTER IV. 

or ever can be drawn from them, must every one 
see with his own eyes, — become his own teacher, — 
director of his own conscience, — out of the Bible % 
How I pity you, poor innocent souls, born in 
countries, whose language the Bible does not yet 
speak ! And you, in every land, who want the first 
step to knowledge, — the power to read! Because 
baptized, you fancy yourselves Christians. Un- 
fortunates ! Learn hence : that the power to read 
is as needful to salvation, as baptism. 

He. " — in due connection with the writings of 
" the Old Testaments 

I. And that too ! I fear, ye dear, pious illiterates, 
you must also learn Hebrew, if ye wish to be certain 
of your salvation. 

He. " Here I allow nothing to his reason, though 
" I always presuppose, that the doctrines of the 
"Religion, preached to me as the Christian, must 
"never contradict an universal and incontestable 
" principle of reason." 

I. Reverend Sir ! Reverend Sir !- — Then the whole 
reasonableness of the Christian Religion consists in 
this, that it is not unreasonable ?■■ — And you feel no 
shame, in your theological heart, to write like this ! 
If you write so, I suppose you preach so. And do 
they, in Hamburg, allow you to preach this ? 

He. " We therefore only then recognise the truth 
" of the Christian Religion, when our notions of the 
" same are just those, which the written traditions, 
"contained in Holy Writ, ought to produce there- 
" from, in our souls." 



LETTER IV. 51 

I. OugMl but what notions ought they to pro- 
duce ?--Can you deny it, Reverend Sir, can you 
conceal it from yourself, that few passages, in the 
whole New Testament, produce in all men the same 
notions'? That the greater part produce different 
notions in different men ? Which then are the 
right ones, that ought to be produced ? Who shall 
decide this] The Hermeneutic] Every one has 
his own Hermeneutic. Which is the true] are 
they all true] or is not one true] And this thing, 
this doubtful, miserable thing is to be the test of 
the internal truth ! What then should be its* test ] 

He. "To be sure, the written traditions of the 
"Christian Religion can give no internal truth, if 
"it have none." 

I. Methinks, Reverend Sir, that you were not 
quite so liberal before, when it seemed proof enough, 
for the internal truth of a Dogma, that it stood 
written there. I hope you are not so liberal because 
at bottom careless, — because a revealed truth, which 
allows not food for thought, is in your eyes as dear 
as one that does] 

He. " But that indeed it ought not to do." 

I. Charming, it ought not to do, what it cannot 
do! — But if the written traditions of the Christian 
Religion neither can, nor ought to give internal 
truth : then indeed it is not from it, that the Christian 
Religion has its internal truth. But if it has its 

° The test of the Hermeneutic— Teansl. 

E2 



52 LETTER IV. 

internal truth, not from the written tradition : then 
it depends not on it. But if it depend not on it, 
it can subsist without it. That is all I want. 

He. " Its object therefore is this, to reveal and 
prove the " internal truth of the same." 

I. If "reveal" means first make known; I have 
proved, Scripture did not first make known to the 
world the internal truth of the Christian Religion. 
Here I add, it now does so still less. We all come 
to it, already provided with the ground-work of 
religion. — And " to 'prove" ! If " prove" mean, give 
a written voucher, in which the words of the posi- 
tion to be proved are contained; the Eeverend 
Gentleman has himself admitted, such a voucher 
cannot and ought not afford aid to the internal 
truth. But if " prove" mean, what it properly 
means : — show the connection of one truth with 
other and undoubted truths ; then surely every other 
book can do this, just as well as the Scripture, 
particularly after Scripture has done it before. 
Again then we see not, why the Christian Religion 
could not now subsist, without the Scripture. 

He. "Consequently they are idle words, when 
"one wishes to oppose to each other, the internal 
" truth of the Christian Religion, and the traditions, 
" or more plainly, the Holy Scripture, as two different 
" things,—" 

I. Oppose ? Who wishes to oppose these to one 
another'? I*? I only assert, they can be now in- 
dependent of each other. Are then two different 



LETTER IV. 53 

things, in every case opposed to one another ? He 
who maintains this, may indeed be said to utter 
idle words; I make no such assertion. I would 
not take from the Theologian the scripture, upon 
which he so well exhibits his skill. I know how 
much the learned study of scripture has aided all 
other branches of knowledge and science; I am 
sensible, into what barbarism we might soon sink, 
if it were clean banished from the world. But the 
Theologian must not press, upon us Christians, his 
learned Bible-Studies as Eeligion. He must not 
cry out, "unchristian!" because an honest layman 
is satisfied with his system, — drawn from the Bible, — 
and believes it true, not so much on that account : 
as that he sees it to be more suitable to God, and 
more salutary to man, than all other systems of 
Eeligion ; because he feels, that this Christian system 
gives him peace. 

He. " — just as useless, as if one were to say : 
" one must explain the laws of a lawgiver by his 
" internal justice. Quite the reverse ; the internal 
"justice of a lawgiver, must be perceived and de- 
"termined by his law." 

I. The Eeverend Gentleman is peculiarly un- 
fortunate in all his instances and elucidations. Quite 
the reverse, say I, in my turn. And if Truth be 
not a weather-cock, she will, I trust, set the matter 
at rest, at my word of command. What? not ex- 
plain the laws of a lawgiver by his internal justice % 
If the letter of the law hit one, not possibly in- 



54 LETTER IV. 

tended by the lawgiver, — if according to the letter, 
from unforeseen circumstances, punishment fall, 
where reward is merited, — will not the just judge 
rightly abandon the letter, and appeal to the law- 
giver's internal justice'? What? perceive and ex- 
plain the internal justice of a lawgiver from his 
laws 1 Solon, surely, was a law-giver. Solon would 
have demanded credit for a more pure and perfect 
justice, than was perceptible from his laws. When 
asked, whether he had given his citizens the best 
laws : what did he answer ? "o™, ov tov? Ka9aira% 

tca\\i(7Tov<;, a\\' <bv iSwavro rovq kclWigtovs. " Ab- 
" solutely the best, — certainly not : but still the best 
w which they were capable of receiving." — -So : — 

However, I am heartily tired of talking, any 
longer, with a deaf man. Otherwise I might, not 
unsuitably, give an application of Solon's words, 
highly offensive to the Reverend Gentleman, if haply 
ignorant, that one of the Fathers has set the example. 
But the poor Fathers generally, — what a rap on 
the knuckles would they receive, from our Lutheran 
Divines, if they wrote now ! This Father scruples 
not to admit a two-fold religion ; one for the com- 
mon man, another, concealed beneath the first, for 
the more subtle and learned head. I am far from 
going that length. With me the Christian Religion 
remains one and the same, but I make Religion 
distinct from its History. As I hold the historical 
knowledge not indispensable, I regard objections 
against that part as unimportant, and deny weak 



LETTER IV. 55 

parts of the Bible, to be weak points in Religion. 
I would not boast to the common people, these 
objections have been met long ago. I despise the 
short-sighted Bible-interpreter, who piles up possi- 
bilities upon possibilities, to confirm the possibility, 
these weak parts may be no weak parts, — who 
would stop a small breach made by the enemy, by 
opening a much larger one in another place. 

And can I be said, in all this, to have sinned 
against the Christian Eeligion % because I said : 
4 What matter the hypotheses and explanations and 
4 proofs of the Theologian to the Christian 1 Chris- 
4 tianity exists, — he feels it true, — he feels himself 
4 blessed. When the paralytic experiences the be- 
4 nefit of the electric spark : what matter to him 
4 whether Nollet, or Franklin, or neither is right V 

The Reverend Gentleman takes good care to 
omit all this. Yet it was written expressly for that 
feeling Christian, upon whom he so cantingly 
enlarges. It was meant that he might confidently 
throw himself into this fortress, when no longer 
able to keep the field with more courageous Theo- 
logians. That the Theologians — aye of every sect, 
neither do, nor need quit the field so soon; who 
does not know that? I admitted, the Theologian 
finds answers enough; I attempted some myself: 
if not good for much, — very possible, — let who can 
do better ! This is my only wish. It was on this 
account solely, I published the Fragments. Or is 
it thought, because I wished and hoped for perfectly 



56 LETTER IV. 

satisfactory answers, I rather ought to have re- 
served my last resource, till I found such answers 
wanting ? Or did I wish, through this last resource, 
to declare all answers superfluous ] No ; this re- 
source was for the simple Christian, and not for 
the Theologian, — it was at least for that Theo- 
logian only, who, by his higher wisdom, was still 
a simple Christian. 

That this last resource, which I deem the most 
impregnable bulwark of Christianity, is called by 
the Reverend Gentleman a shield of straw — causes 
me, for his sake, much grief! I fear, in his theo- 
logic wars, he has been not uninfected by the 
Heterodoxy of his adversary, more than he would 
willingly appear, in a Hamburg pulpit, — more than 
he has yet perceived himself. For he thus denies 
all inward feeling of Christianity. And if he has 
not yet shrieked from the pulpit : " Feeling ! what 
" feeling ? Feeling is a shield of straw ! Our 
" Hermeneutic, — our symbolic books, these, these 
" are the all-protecting, impenetrable, adamantine 
" Shield of the Faith ?" — it only arises, probably, from 
this, that in the symbolic books themselves, this 
shield of straw is still esteemed of value. It matters 
little to him were it all straw, for we find many 
shields of straw in those books. But it is so narrow, 
suited to shelter each man singly, with religion in 
his heart ; — of what use then to a Pastor, who would 
magnify his own office and shelter at once his 
Bible, — and his whole dearly beloved flock ? 



LETTER IV. 57 

Hear in his own words, — they well deserve it, — 
how he advises his worthy Colleagues to be open 
runaways, rather than avail themselves of this shield : 
" I should greatly pity," says he, with tremulous 
voice, " the Christian, who is also a Theologue, if 
" for lack of other grounds, he find a dire necessity 
" to oppose this straw-plaited shield to the fiery 
" darts, which are to be found in the Fragments." — 
This should I do likewise, — to a certain extent ; at 
all events, I should shrug my shoulders at one, who 
so badly understands his trade. But did I speak 
of " a Christian, who is also a Theologue ?" Ought 
every Christian, — must he be a Theologian also ? 
I ever find the best Christians among those, who 
know least Theology. What if they come not 
within range of the fiery darts, — the shield of straw 
may, at least, be of use against blows ! — But the 
Reverend Gentleman is decided: "I would rather 
" advise him to take to flight." — If he think he 
must, at least, retain the Theologian to his sect, a 
happy journey to him! Enough if those stand to 
their colors, who are only Christians. — "For apply 
" these positions of the Editor, and you give up 
" the Bible, to save Religion : but what Religion]" — 
What 1 The same from which the Bible rose. The 
same, which in later times, when Religion was 
corrupted by the priest, was again drawn there- 
from. Or is that not really the Christian Religion, 
which has been drawn from the Bible? "Cer- 
tainly not," the Reverend Gentleman decides* 



58 LETTER IV. 

" not the Christian Religion, which stands and falls 

" with the Bible." I am sorry for that, — the Bible 

stand and fall ! What with its Divine Inspiration % 

" By all means," he must say, " without Bible, 

"no Christianity; without plenary inspiration, no 

" Bible." 

Let me here fall back on another writer. The 

words " stand and fall" naturally remind me of 

the passage.* 

The question, whether the books of the New Testament are 
inspired by God, is not so important to the Christian Reli- 
gion, as whether they are genuine. Religion does not absolutely 
stand or fall, with the question of inspiration. Suppose God had 
not inspired, but left Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul to 
themselves, to write what they knew ; provided the Scriptures were 
ancient, genuine, and trustworthy, the Christian Religion would 
still remain the true one. The miracles, by which it is confirmed, 
would prove its truth just as well, though the witnesses of the 
same were un-inspired, human witnesses. The miracles being 
true, the discourses of Christ, so confirmed, become the infallible 
word of God. It were quite possible to deny the inspiration 
of the New Testament, and yet believe the Christian Religion 
with all one's heart. 

How might this passage shelter me ! But I 
need it not. Nor would I imitate the base mendi- 
cant, who sets an angry dog upon a brother, to 
avoid being bitten himself. For, if I know the 
Reverend Mr. Goeze, he too well understands his 
own interest, not to keep fast his hold upon me; 
rather than fly afresh at a Michaelis. 

* Michaelis, in s. Einleitung in die Schriften des N. T. S. 73. n.a. 



LETTER V. 



ANTI-GOEZE 

ie. compulsory contributions to the " Voluntary Contributions" of the 
Rev. Mr. Goeze. 

The First. 

(please God it be the last !) 

I. 

Multa sunt sic digna revinci, ne gravitate adorentur. 

Tertullianus. 

1778. 



Reverend and dear Sir, 

Pray do not go on so thoughtlessly 
blustering. — It is not a pleasant task to me, that 
I must so soon follow up my defiance. But otherwise 
you might think I am not in earnest. — See then, what 
plans I herewith sketch out, for my warfare with 
you. You may infer also what the tone will be, from 
the Lemma of Tertullian, and the remaining words 
which follow it. Out-bawl me you can every eighth 
day : you know, where. Outwrite me you certainly 
shall not. 

God knows, I have no objection, that you, and 
all School-rectors in Lower Saxony, take the field 
against my Anonymous. I rather rejoice ; for it was 



60 LETTER V. 

to this end, I published him, that right many 
might test, — might refute him. I also hope, he will 
in good time come into proper hands, which does 
not seem the case, as yet. Thus I think by making 
him known, I do more service to the Christian cause, 
than you, by all your Religious Tracts and News- 
papers. 

What, am I to be the enemy of the Christian 
Religion, because I think it more proof than you 
dol Because I notify, to the medical officer, the 
pestilence, that walketh in darkness, am I to be 
the man, who brought the plague into the land] 
For in a word, Reverend Sir, — you are vastly mis- 
taken, if you think the Anonymous would have 
remained unknown, but for my help. Know then, 
the book exists entire, in many MS. copies, — though 
fragments of the first essay only, are in the library. 
This Library, forsooth, you say, would have been 
made more useful to the world, if I had collated 
for you, word for word, all the old German Bibles 
found therein.* 

Meanwhile, do you not yourself assure us, these 
abominable Fragments have already given rise to 
works, whose utility far transcends any mischief, to 
be apprehended from the publication ] 

And have I, — the causa sine qua non of these 
excellent works, — to apprehend, on this account, the 



• Goeze had, in vain, requested Lessing to perform for him this te4ious 

task,— Tbansl. 



LETTER V. 61 

sentence of Convocation ?* I rather promise myself 
a reward from this tribunal, when no longer ex- 
clusively occupied in curbing wrong, and punishing 
wicked actions, — when more enlightened times give 
it leisure, to seek out hidden virtue, and reward good 
actions. 

Charming, excellent, quite in Luther's spirit! — 
to urge on Convocation to a step, which if taken 
two hundred and fifty years ago, had deprived 
us of all reformation ! What rights had Luther, 
which every Doctor of Theology does not still pos- 
sess ? If no Doctor of Theology may now translate 
the Bible anew, — as he can answer before God 
and his conscience, — then had Luther no right. I 
add : still less right had Luther. He acted arbitrarily 
against the Church Dogma : that it were better the 
Bible w 7 ere not read by the commonalty, in their 
own language. 

The true Lutheran does not wish to be defended 
by Luther's writings, but by Luther's spirit; and 
Luther's spirit absolutely demands, that no man 



* Convocation ! when will that Nursing-Mother of Heresy and Schism, 
in our own land, die a natural death ? Lord Clarendon himself tells us :* 

" Clergymen understand the least, and take the worst measure of human affairs, of 
«' all mankind, that can write and read." 

True, fortunately for England, it is now practically effete ; it is now the 
conference of Lords Doodle and Noodle. 

Doodle. Noodle, I make my petition to the king. 
Noodle. Doodle, do so. 

(Convocation prorogued. Exeunt omnes.) 

• Life, Vol I, p. 66. Oxford, 1759. 



62 LETTER V. 

be prevented from advancing in the knowledge of 
the truth, according to his own judgement. But 
all are prevented, if one be prohibited from im- 
parting to others his own advance. Without 
individual contributions, no general advance is 
possible. 

Reverend Sir, if you could bring matters to that 
point, that our Clergymen should become our Popes ; — 
have power to prescribe, where we must stop in 
investigating Scripture ;— prevent our imparting the 
result : then would I be the first, to pass from these 
petty Popes to the Pope of Rome. We hope many 
resolutely think thus, though they speak not openly. 
Thus to scare the Protestant back into the bosom 
of the Romish Church, stamps you as bad a Poli- 
tician, as you are Theologian. — 

One of the excellent works,* which, without me, 
would have remained in the barren loins of nonentity, 
is Mr. Mascho's " Defence of the Christian Religion :" 
or, as I should rather say, the " Defence of Mr. 
Mascho's Christian Religion" For, in truth, the 
" Defence" is not so much his own, as is the Religion 
which he defends. What ! could you have read 
this, — read the work through, — when, for the 71st 
time this year, you sounded a blast upon your horn ?— 
Indeed ? 

Then the Public cannot learn too soon, what 



* Answers to the " Fragments."— Tbansl. 



LETTER V. 63 

various weights and measures Goeze and Co. have 
in Hamburg! 

I am sorry so to blame this, otherwise respectable, 
firm. But why not just and full weight, when 
dealing with old friends] Why more careful to 
make friends, than to retain them % 

Poor Mascho, if you let the envious man, who 
would guide all actions in his own channels, dispatch 
me first, he is sure to give you a trimming too. 
At present, he affects not to see to which side you 
incline. Help is what he wants: Tros Rutulusve 
/wa£— He would add to the number of his party, 
in the Periodicals. But wait ! 

Is it seemly to address in a letter, a party different 
from him, to whom it is directed. I turn to you 
again, Reverend Sir, and once more ask you : have 
you really read Mr. Mascho's " Defence," which you 
so much praise ] 

Eeally 1 — Then what I accuse you of is proved. 
You have various weights and measures, — " an 
abomination to the Lord!' 9 Me, you cheat with one; 
Mr. Mascho, you serve with another. That, against 
which you warn others in me, you commend in him. 
Drugs which, at my prescription, are dangerous and 
deadly; at his recipe, you sell in equal or larger 
dose, as quite harmless and wholesome. 

Or, to express the thing, Eeverend Sir, in your 
own ingenious metaphor of the "shield of straw:'* 
Mr. Mascho fights under the same shield of straw, 
whereby you made me so ridiculous and suspicious 



64 LETTER V. 

to the world. How does this shield, on my arm 
worse than none, become on his a weapon so passing 
fair? 

To wit, does not Mr. Mascho assert : ' the Bible 
' is not a Revelation, but contains one' 1 

Does not Mr. Mascho also distinguish c the 
c Letter from the Spirit of the Bible' ? 

Does not Mr. Mascho teach, ' Religion existed, 
before the Bible'? 

And are not these the three positions, on which 
the Reverend Mr. Goeze entered the lists with me ? 

You cannot say, Reverend Sir, you have not 
found these positions in him. They not only stand 
there in plain words : but all and everything, which 
Mr. Mascho says, refers to, and is grounded on 
them. 

[The further examination of Mr. Mascho's book, 
continued to the end of the letter, being quite un- 
interesting to the English reader, has been omitted.] 



LETTER VI. 



Bella geri placeal nullos habitura triumphos ! 

Luc. 

1778. 



My very Eeverend Sir, 

I received your " Something anticipating"* 
against my — not your first lie — " indirect and direct 
" hostile attacks against our most holy Religion, &C," 
late on Easter Eve, — just in time, to taste your 
excellent new wine.-)* This I mean to relish during 
the Festival ! thought I. And I have relished it. 
God grant, the next run of the vat relish, and agree 
with me as well ! 

But what is this 1 The Eight Eeverend Gentle- 
man rebukes me in his " Something anticipating" 
(Etwas Yorlaufigen), which I, as more voluble, call 
the anticipating something (Vorlaufige Etwas), with 
vast earnestness and emphasis, for my equivoques^ 



* Etwas Vorlaufiges. 

f Lessing here plays on the words Vorlaufig (anticipating) and Vorlauf 
(new wine). — Trans. 

X The Right Reverend Gentleman writes Equivocen, and that more than 
once. It is neither a slip of the pen nor a misprint ; but it was his 
pleasure to use this jocose orthography — and make a nice little pun ! 
JEquivocum, quasi dicas, eqtji vocem. For indeed what does dquivoker 



66 



LETTER VI. 



and puns; and yet I am again at this unseemly 
work, — equivocating and punning with the words 
Vorlaufig and Vorlauf ; without explaining whether 
I mean by Vorlauf that which runs from the wine- 
press, or the still. 

But pray forgive a weakness, Bight Reverend 
Sir, which is become with me a second nature. 
Every man has his own peculiar style, just as he 
has his own peculiar nose ; and it is neither court- 
eous nor Christianly, to laugh at an honest man, 
on account of his nose, however odd it may be. 
How can I help it that I have no other style? 
That it is not the effect of elaborate study, I am 
quite sure ; for it plays the most extraordinary pranks, 
and most wantonly sports, at the very time, I have 
most sought to master the subject by cool reflection, 
and mature consideration. 

It matters little how we write; but much, how 
we think. Surely you do not hold, that under 
words flowery, and rich in images, there must needs 
lie a sense shuffling and shifty % That, to think 
rightly and definitely, one must use the plainest, — 
commonest, — flattest expressions. That it injures 
the truth, when we give to the cold Symbolic ideas, 
a little of the warmth and life of Natural Signs ? 

mean but the neighing of a horse? not to Jerome Cardan, but to folks 
less knowing in neighings than Cardan.— Or would the Right Reverend 
Gentleman be still more jocose, and allude to a word of Luther's, in his 
" Hanswurst von Wolfenbuttel," (Jack-pudding from Wolfenbiittel.) The 
Librarian at Wolfenbuttel recalled this book to his mind, the book recalled 
the word ; I am truly glad to be on the track of his wit. This I may call 
an imitation of Luther.— Gr. E. Lessing. 



LETTER VI. 67 

How ridiculous, to ascribe the depth of a wound, 
not to the sharp, but to the brightly polished sword ! — 
to ascribe the advantage, truth gives our adversary, 
to his dazzling style ! I know of no dazzling style, 
which does not borrow its brightness, more or less, 
from the truth. Truth alone gives genuine bright- 
ness; — even under buffoonery and banter, it must 
lie at least as a foil. 

So let us speak of truth, and not of style* — My 
style I give up to the mercy of all the world : and 
to speak frankly, the theatre may have spoiled it a 
little. I know the principal fault right well, by 
which it may be distinguished from so many others ; 
and too marked a distinction is a fault, But like 
Ovid, — when the critics would cleanse him of every 
fault, — I claim indulgence here. For it is not a 
fault, — it is original sin. To wit : it tarries over its 
metaphors, often spins them into similes, and indeed, 
now and then, is too apt to paint in allegory, — often 
entangled thereby in farfetched terms of comparison, 
which might easily be transformed. This fault 
my dramatic works may have helped to strengthen. 
Our attention to dialogue accustoms us, to have 
a sharp eye on every figurative expression ; because 
it is certain, that in the real intercourse of life, the 
course of which is seldom regulated by the reason, 
and almost always by the fancy, most passages are 
drawn from the metaphors, which the one or the 
other employs. It is this peculiarity, — properly ob- 
served in the imitation, — which gives to the dialogue 

F2 



68 LETTER VI. 

flexibility, and truthfulness. But how long and 
accurately, oftentimes, must a metaphor be examined, 
before that stream is discovered in it, which can 
best carry us on! and so it is natural, the theatre 
should not produce the best prose writers. If Cicero 
had been a better dialogue-writer, he would probably 
be less admirable, in his unbroken and continuous 
writings. Here, the direction of the thoughts re- 
mains the same ; — in the dialogue, it changes every 
moment : for the settled equal step of the former, 
the latter often demands a spring or a jump ; and 
seldom is the high jumper, the best dancer. 

That, Eight Eeverend Sir, is my style, — not my 
logic— But, say you, my logic, like my style, must 
be theatrical. No ; good logic, however applied, 
is always the same; nay, the mode of applying it 
is everywhere the same. He who exhibits logic 
in a comedy, would betray no want of it in a sermon. 
Just as he, whose logic fails in a sermon, could never, 
through this lack of logic, compose even a tolerable 
comedy, — though a man of the most inexhaustible 
humour under the sun. Do you think that Pere 
Abraham would have composed good comedies'? 
Certainly not, his sermons are far too wretched. But 
who hesitates to believe, that Moliere and Shakespeare 
would have composed and delivered excellent ser- 
mons, if they, instead of the theatres, had chosen 
to mount the pulpit ] 

When you, Right Eeverend Sir, persecuted the 
good Schlosser, in so edifying a manner, on account of 



LETTER VI. 69 

his comedies, a double question arose. The first: 
has a preacher any right to compose comedies'? To 
which I replied : " why not \ if he can." The second : 
has the author of comedies any right to compose 
sermons ? To which my reply was ; " why not % if he 
" likes." 

But to what purpose, all this tattle ? What have 
I to do, now, with the paltry matters of style and 
theatre : now, when so terrible a sentence is hanging 
over me ? — There he stands, my pitiless accuser, 
and neighs forth* blood and condemnation, and I, 
simple ninny, stand by his side and quietly brush 
the flue from his clothes. — 

I must, I must take fire, — or my calmness and 
coolness itself, will make me deserving of reproach. 

What, Right Reverend Sir, have you the 
effrontery to charge me, with direct or indirect 
hostile attacks upon the Christian Religion % What 
hinders me from publishing to the world, that all 
the heterodoxy, which you now condemn in me, 
I have before heard and learnt, from your own 
mouth. What hinders me? One untruth would 
be worth the other. This alone hinders me : I have 
not your effrontery. I do not venture to say, what 
I cannot prove: and you — you do every day, what 
you should do, only one day in the week. You 
chatter, calumniate, and storm: the pulpit may 
provide proof and evidence. 

* Wiehert, refers to " the voice of a horse," vid. note page 65, 



70 LETTER VI. 

And this libel of Goeze, with so infamous a 
title, — what does it contain? It contains nothing, 
but the wretched criticisms, which already are, or 
deserve to be, in the " Voluntary Contributions". 
But yes; it also contains a thrice warmed up sop, 
which I have given to the cat long ago. And 
still must the Eeverend Gentleman's dear children 
in Christ have this sop, already licked and be- 
snuffled, thrust into their mouth. 

Is it conceivable, that any honest man of learning, 
— I will not say a Theologian, — can, under such 
a title, again send into the world refuted charges, 
without taking the least notice of their refutation ? — 
" Does he know nothing then of this refutation ?" — 
O yes! He knows very well, it exists; he has 
heard of it: but he has not yet read it, and we 
shall see, after the Holidays, whether he finds it 
necessary to reply to it. And meanwhile, Eight 
Eeverend Sir, have you the barbarity to repeat your 
accusations'? to repeat them in a more embittered 
tone ? And are you omniscient ? are you infallible ? 
— And can there be absolutely nothing in my 
refutation, which might place me in a less un- 
favourable light? nothing which might move you, 
at least partially, to withdraw your impeachment? 
And are you so sure, so perfectly sure, that you 
will, henceforth and for ever, view the matter, as 
you once viewed it? In this one manoeuvre, 
Eeverend Sir, I clearly see you, as you are. You 
have not time, before the Holidays, to hear the 



LETTER VI. 71 

defence of the accused. You repeat the indictment, 
and affix his name to the gallows without hesitation. 
After the holidays, you will have time to see, 
whether, in consequence of his defence, his name 
should be removed, or not! 

Is it possible to preserve the least regard for 
such a man] — For a third party: perhaps it might. 
But not for him, at whose head these stones are 
aimed. Should he not, in his turn, be allowed 
to employ all sorts of weapons against such a man ? 
What weapons can be more assassin-like, than his 
conduct? Nevertheless, do not fear, Reverend Sir, 
that I should overstep the bounds of retaliation. 
I shall be far from even approaching them, however 
scornfully, disdainfully, recklessly I may write. 
You may find in me an unmannerly, but certainly 
not an immoral opponent. 

This distinction between unmannerly and immoral, 
which is very important, though both words, accord- 
ing to their derivation, should mean precisely the 
same, shall ever remain between us. Only I will 
endeavour to set your immoral way of disputing 
in the strongest light, even though it could only 
be accomplished in the most unmannerly way. 

Now my paper is full : and you shall not receive 
from me more than one sheet at a time. I am 
permitted, to let fall upon your bare head, drop 
by drop, the bucket of dirty water, in which you 
would drown me. 



LETTER VII. 



Avolent quantum volent palece levis jidei quocunque affiatu tentationum, 
eo purior massa frumenti in horrea domini reponetur. 

Tertulli. 

1778. 



Well: — "my direct and indirect hostile attacks 
"upon the Christian Religion." 

So then! Mr. Goeze regards one passage, at 
least, in the New Testament as not inspired, not 
divine; but as a merely good human precept, to 
which he may make exceptions at pleasure. Judge 
not, that ye be not judged. 

No truly! He himself does not condemn. He 
merely repeats the condemnation, which the Holy 
Ghost has pronounced. He has only the honour 
and the pleasure of announcing their condemnation 
to Messrs. Basedow, Teller, Semler, Bahrdt, the 
Authors of the Allgemeine Biblioihek, and my un- 
worthy self. For there it stands ! He that believeth 
not shall be damned! — Believeth not him; believeth 
not precisely the same, as he believes, — shall be 
damned ! 

And why should he not, in spite of his persisting 
in judging, which is but the innocent echo of the 



LETTER VII. 73 

thunder, hope to attain to bliss % Indeed, I imagine, 
it is through this very judging, he hopes to attain 
to it. What wonder? did not the pious harlot 
hope to be saved through child-bearing? The 
words, on which she built, also stand there. 

And in how delicate, gentle, and insinuating a 
way, does he, every now and then, set about this 
ticklish business ! Quite in the tone and after the 
manner of a certain Monsieur Loyal , in a certain 
Comedy, which, before certain people, one does not 
willingly name. He is anxious about my reputation ! 
— but what signifies this bubble'? — he is so anxious 
about my salvation ! He trembles so compassionately 
for me, at the hour of death ! Sometimes he is 
quite polite to me, — so that I may not feel it too 
painful, when he thrusts me out of my father's house. 

Ce Monsieur Loyal porte un air Men deloyal. 

But what is all this to the purpose? Let us 
take up the charges themselves. — Enough, that my 
heart condemns me not, and that I, with all cheer- 
fulness before God, both dare, and will tear the 
mask from the face of every intolerant hypocrite, 
who thus encounters me, — even though the whole 
skin remain hanging to it! 

First then of my indirect attacks. — By these the 
Reverend Gentleman understands : " the printing 
"of the Fragments under my auspices, and the 
"defence of the author, undertaken by me." 

The first is notorious : and I can as little deny 
it, as I should be desirous to do so, if I could. The 



74 LETTER VII. 

second I will not allow to be said, or if possible, 
even to be thought of me. At least not in the 
sense, which the Reverend Gentleman attaches to 
it. I had the Fragments printed: and I would 
still have them printed if all the Goezes in the 
world condemned me, on that account, to the nether- 
most hell. The grounds upon which I thought 
I could do it with a good conscience, I have 
already and in different ways adduced. But Mr. 
Goeze will not allow, that these grounds are of 
the least avail, until I convince him, that they 
would justify me, "if I were to have Fragments 
" printed, in which the prerogatives of the noble 
u House I serve, the honour and innocence of its 
"late great and irreproachable Minister, and even 
" of the reigning Lord, were so attacked, as the 
" truth of the Christian Religion, the honour and 
" innocence of the Holy Apostles, and even of our 
"eternal King, really are in the aforesaid Frag- 
" ments." How childish ! how cunning, and how 
malicious! — Do let us, Reverend Sir, before all 
things, first adjust the matter on both sides. 
You have forgotten to place a small trifle in the 
other scale : and you are well aware, in equilibrio 
every trifle gives the turn. 

This once set right, I hope you will allow 
the adducible, credible testimony of my Superiors 
full weight. For instance; only admit, that such 
historical and political Fragments, as these, through 
the printing of which you would willingly lead me 



LETTER VII. 75 

on to slippery ground, were of such a nature, that 
their groundlessness were not only clearly and 
distinctly apparent, but that they also gave unex- 
pected opportunity and material, of still exalting 
and strengthening, from several sides, the honour 
and the prerogatives of the aforesaid House: what 
then would be your doubt, as to whether I should 
dare to have such Fragments printed 1 ? on what is 
it grounded ? On the supposition, that it may not 
prove so with regard to that honour and those 
prerogatives'? On the supposition, that one should 
not undermine a tottering foundation, even for the 
purpose of strengthening it 1—0, Reverend Sir, 
the most illustrious House of my Lord is greatly 
indebted to you for this flattery, for this anxious 
care ! — For which I feel confident I shall be able, 
under any circumstances, to adduce credible testi- 
mony from my Superiors. 

Or must I not admit, with regard to the truth 
of the Religion, which I profess, what I do, in 
the case of the prerogatives of the House, I served 
Must I not conclude that all objections to the one, 
may at least be as easily answered, as those made 
to the other 1 ? Must I not expect, that here also 
new objections will give occasion to new discussions, 
and more acute doubts, to more acute solutions ] 

" Certainly !" cries the Reverend Gentleman, 
" certainly ! Religion, regarded as the substance 
"of the truths, revealed for our salvation, certainly 
" gains, the more honestly and acutely it is con* 



76 LETTER VII. 

" troverted. But that is only, objective Keligion ; 
" only objective ! With subjective Eeligion it is 
" quite otherwise. This loses, most assuredly, by 
" such disputes infinitely more, than the other can 
" possibly gain by them ! Consequently" 

And what is this subjective Eeligion ? — " Men's 
"frame of mind in regard to Eeligion, their faith, 
" their comfort, their trust in us, their teachers. 
" These, these are imperilled by every word, which 
" is written in German, against our most Holy 
" Eeligion." 

Indeed! By heaven! a profound distinction, 
which I request him to leave in his School-termi- 
nology, if it is not to be hissed out, and used exactly 
in opposition to his own definition. 

For, if it is true, that Eeligion objectively gains, 
and subjectively loses by all and every assault, made 
upon it : who will maintain, that it accordingly 
must be decided by the greater loss, or gain, whether 
such attacks are to be tolerated, or not ? Yes, if 
loss and gain were here perfectly homogeneous 
things, which one need only subtract, the one from 
the other, in order to be decided by the result. 
But the gain is essential, and the loss is only ac- 
cidental. The gain stretches over all time; the 
loss is limited to the moment, as long as the objec- 
tions are unanswered. The gain is profitable to 
all good men, who love enlightenment and con- 
viction; the loss affects only a few, who neither 
deserve to be taken into consideration, on account 



LETTER VII. 77 

of their understanding, or of their morals. The 
loss affects only the paleas levis jidei\ % only the 
light Christian chaff, which at every puff of douht 
is separated from the heavy grains, and flies off. 

Of this, says Tertullian, let as much fly off, as 
may! Avolent quantum volenti — But not so our 
Church-teachers of the day. Not even a single 
husk of the Christian chaff must be lost ! They 
would rather the grains themselves were not win- 
nowed and turned over. Especially may every 
thing, which Tertullian says with so much acute- 
ness of the heresies of his time, be fully applied 
to the writings of the unbelievers and free-thinkers 
of our day. What are these writings but heresies ? 
Only that they are wanting in that, which makes 
the heresies proper so formidable. They aim directly 
at no splitting and rendering ; they make no parties 
and factions. 

The old heretics taught orally, more than in 
writing, and always began by endeavouring to pro- 
cure followers, who could also give a political im- 
portance to the instructions they delivered. How 
much less mischievous the misbeliever, who now 
sends his crotchets only to the press, and lets them 
make as many partisans, as they can, without his 
further assistance. — The writings of free-thinkers 
are evidently then the less evil: and is the less 
evil to be more pernicious, than the great ? If the 

* See the motto at the beginning of this letter. 



78 LETTER VII. 

greater evil must exist, " in order that they, who 
" are righteous may become manifest" — ut fides, ha- 
bendo tentationem, haberet etiam probationem: why 
should we not tolerate the less evil, which brings 
about this very good 1 O ye fools ! who would 
gladly banish the hurricane out of nature, because 
it here buries a ship in the sands, and there dashes 
another in pieces on a rocky shore ! — O ye hypo- 
crites ! for we know you. You care not about this 
unfortunate ship, for you would have insured it: 
you simply care about your own little garden ; your 
own little comforts, little indulgencies. The wicked 
hurricane ! there, it has torn the roof off your 
summer-house ; there too, rudely shaken the loaded 
trees ; there overturned your whole costly orangery, 
in seven earthen pots. "What is it to you, how 
much good the hurricane otherwise promotes in 
Nature 1 Could it not be effected, without injuring 
your little garden ? Why does it not blow past 
your hedge ? or at least take his cheeks less full, 
as soon as he reaches your landmark % When Ter- 
tullian with regard to those, who in his day were 
so angry at the heresies, at whose progress they 
were so surprised, says: vane et inconsiderate hoc 
ipso scandalizantur, quod tantum hcereses valeant: 
what would he say of you, Reverend Sir, who raise 
such a noise about the paper foundation of a pos- 
sible heresy % About the Fragments of one anony- 
mous ! Would he not likewise say : " Short-sighted 
" man, — nihil valebunt, si ilia tantum valere, non 



LETTER VII. 79 

"mireris? Your very noise is in fault, if these 
" Fragments occasion more mischief, than they are 
" designed to do. The anonymous wished to ac- 
" quire no name by writing : else he would have 
" given his name. He wished to make no coterie : 
" or he would have done it in his life-time. In a 
*' word : he who had these Fragments printed, has 
"much less responsibility, than you, who raise the 
"cry of Murder! against them. The former has 
" only put it in the power of many to read them : 
"you have been the occasion that many actually 
"have, and will read them." 

Perhaps the Reverend Gentleman more willingly 
hears this rebuke from the mouth of a Father of 
the Church, than from mine! — 






LETTER VIII. 



Tonto sin saber Latin,* 
Nunca es gran tonto. 

Francis de Roxas. 

1778. 



*" A fool is never a great fool, without knowledge of Latin." 

[The daily increasing contempt of the people for 
our Universities, and for ancient literature, deserves 
serious enquiry. 

In part, the fault is with the people — in part 
with ourselves. The lovers of ancient literature, 
for its own sake, are always a scanty band, compared 
with those who demand at every turn : " cui bono ?" 
For one votary of the Madonna of beauty, — for 
one such prophet " in girdle of camel's hair," there 
are four hundred and fifty, who . would turn her 
into the housemaid of utility, — worshippers and 
priests of Mammon, that " eat at Jezebel's table.'* 

This divorce of letters from, so called, useful 
knowledge, is suicidal, to end in barbarism; but it 
bids the scholar labor to adorn his doctrine, in the 
eyes of all men, by avoiding, more strictly than 
ever, all monkish pedantry. Away with baby 



LETTER VIII. 81 

scholarship, and nonsense verses, it is not the golden 

age, but the iron age, we shall have to deal with. 

Later useful authors, — as Plutarch and Lucian, are 

no more to be proscribed as " unlicensed" Greek. 

Nay we must unite with the letters of Greece and 

Rome, those of England, France and Germany. 

Public school distinctions, for 

" Four and twenty blackbirds 
" Baked in a pie" 

in Greek Iambics, are like the tags and stripes of* 
gold lace, which once marked the gentleman, but 
which have now descended to the May-day chimney- 
sweeper. The palmy days of Eton and of nonsense 
verse are past, and our " craft is in danger," if such 
nursery trifles usurp, with us, the place and name 
of manly scholarship. 

The ancients were men, not Scholars. What are 
ye t and what do you seek from them ? Words ; 
whereas the silent temple of the mighty past claims 
a rational worship from all who enter, — not a pedlar 
display of its holy relics. Classical associations should 
suggest words of power and images of beauty* 
opening new regions of thought and scenes beyond 
the vulgar eye, binding to common life and nature, 
associations of history and poetic fable, that have 
charmed mankind for ever. 

I know a Dominie, who gains his bread by the 
text of Demosthenes, so utterly devoid of all feeling 
with his author, that he still sighs for the days of 
the Stuarts, and prays that Italy may ever remain 

G 



82 LETTER VIII. 

under Austria and the Pope. This is not to " unsphere 
" the spirit" of the manly Greek and Roman, as 
England requires at our hands :• 

" Ye have the letters Cadmus gave, 

" Think ye, he meant them for a slave ?" 

Milton was both Latinist and poet, but how 
scornfully does he stigmatize our system :* 

An old error of Universities, — themes, verses, and orations, — 
matters wrung from poor striplings, like blood out of the nose, 
or the plucking of untimely fruit ; with the ill habit they get of 
wretched barbarizing, against the Latin and Greek idiom, with 
their untutored Anglicisms, for want of well continued and 
judicious conversing, among pure authors digested, which they 
scarce taste; nor proceed to learn the substance of good things 
and arts in due order, which would bring the whole language 
quickly into their power, before poverty or youthful years hasten 
them, with the sway of friends, either to an ambitious and mer- 
cenary, or ignorantly zealous Divinity, f 

Another fatal symptom in our English Universities 
is clerical domination. If we imitate the Sorbonne, 
we shall inevitably share her fate. Our days are 
numbered. J Let Universities remember their high 
vocation, nor 

" Born for the Universe, narrow the mind, 

" And to party give up, what was meant for mankind." 

* Nondum juvenes declamationibus continebantur, cum Sophocles 
atque Euripides invenerunt verba, quibus deberent loqui. Nondum urn- 
bratieus doctor ingenia deleverat, cum Pindarus, novemque Lyrici, 
Homericia versibus canere sustinuerunt. — Petr. Abb. 

f Letter to Hartlib. 

% Joufiroy, in his admirable history, has shown how those Theological 
pedants came to be regarded, in the streets of Paris, as the owls and the 
bats, by birds at noonday. 



LETTER VIII. 



83 



Sir Roger de Coverley, would only go to the 
play, when it was "a good Church of England 
"Comedy." We have a clique of Puritans, lurking 
in Cambridge Halls, who would " make of sweet 
religion a rhapsody of words," and convert our 
gallant guild to a mere Church of England farce. — * 
Forcing us to " make a gain of godliness." They 
cannot learn Hindustani forsooth but from " a good 
"Christian." They reject the first Botanist of the 
age, Sir E. Smith, as Unitarian ; in short the 
heavens and the earth must not be studied, if not 
endorsed by the thirty-nine articles. It is the old 
Puritan redivivus, 

" In the house of pure Emmanuel 

" I had my education ; 

" In the sacred tongue of Canaan 

" I took my recreation." 

" He is given to prayer," says Dame Quickly, 
"he is something peevish that way: but nobody 
"but has his fault; but let that pass." Let us 
beware however, lest the parasitic ivy strangle the 
British Oak; lest every study be narrowed, by the 
" strong contagion of the priestly gown, that sells 
" e'en to its prayers and blessings." How soon, 
among such a race, does the beauty of poetry lose 
all her fresh and fairy looks ! How does truth cease 
to show herself in her sublimest attitude ! 

" TV unconquerable mind and Freedom's holy flame." 

Let us never forget that, here at least, it is our 
birthright "to war in words with all, who war 
" with thought." Else we shall bare our Halls and 

g2 



84 LETTER VIII. 

Golleges to a few north country sizars, — starvelings 
who seek one of the Priest's offices for a piece of 
bread. We shall drive away the noble and the 
great, if we have not mare high and generous aims 
in our institutions. " Are you going down, Handel, 
" to take your degree V 9 — " No ; but my bellows- 
blower is gone to take his."] 



If the one, meantime, would be very suitable 
without the other. — Even if it were possible, "to 
"manage that the Christian Religion objectively 
u might draw all the advantage from the objections 
of the free-thinkers, without subjectively incurring 
the least injury." 

That would certainly be the better. But how? 
by what means ? — Here it is, that an idea is brought 
forth, which sounds pedantic enough to be, possibly, 
well grounded. Another person would only turn it 
into ridicule : I will test it. For anything pedantic 
is almost a recommendation to me. 

It should be arranged, we are told, that the 
controversy should never be carried on in any way, 
but the language of the learned. " Write in Latin, 
Gentlemen ! write in Latin "! — Yes ! he who may have 
been industrious in the Classes ! and knows Latin ! 

— No more, Mr. Sub-conrector : or your true de- 
sign will be apparent. You would willingly procure, 
for your dear Latin, one recommendation more. 
" Learn Latin, youths ; learn Latin ! All objections 
u against Religion are written in Latin! Though you 



LETTER VIII, 



85 



" do not wish to write any yourselves, you must be 
" acquainted with' those that are written." — And so 
youths will learn Latin, till their heads are turned. 
But I have said, that I will not only make the idea 
ridiculous, but put it to the test. — And so it should 
be my business, that this (paper) should effect that 
purpose. And that would not be my fault. Enough, 
I will set to work in earnest and in order. Well, 
whoever desires to write against Religion, is not to 
be allowed to write in anything, but Latin ; that the 
common man be not scandalised. — 

And in the countries where the common man 
pretty generally understands Latin, as in Poland, Hun- 
gary, &e. — there, I suppose, the objections against 
Religion must be written in Greek? — Naturally! 
What a pretty trick, for the pedagogues thus to 
make the Greek language also common in these 
countries ! For it is understood, that the Latin books 
written against Eeligion, in other countries* will not 
come into these lands. 

But to return to the ridiculous, which I would 
so willingly avoid! — " What does it matter, if the 
"proposed plan does not answer in Poland and 
" Hungary ? It does answer at any rate in Germany" 

Surely 1 does it answer ? — Can a plan answer, 
which is neither practicable, fair, prudent, nor 
Christian % — This is what I will prove, as seriously 
as possible. 

True, I must first suppose it practicable. I must 
allow, that a law might and could be passed upon 



86 



LETTER VIII. 



the subject. For a prohibition less than a law, 
would avail nothing. The head, or at least perpetual 
imprisonment on bread and water, and without pen 
and ink, must be the penalty, in the whole Roman 
Empire, if any one should write against sacred things 
otherwise than in Roman. Let the law rest on the 
name of the Holy Roman Empire, and shall it not be 
practicable ? 

Good; let it be practicable: but would it be 
fair? — Can a law indeed be fair, which would give 
as many incompetent persons a title to any thing, as 
it would exclude competent persons from it? — And 
who does not see, that this would happen in this 
case? Or is it the Latin itself, which guarantees 
the competency, to entertain and bring forward 
doubts about Religion? Is it ignorance of Latin 
itself, which denies this competency to all men 
without exception ? Is it not possible for any man 
to be conscientious and thoughtful without Latin? 
Are there no blockheads, no fools with Latin? 
I will not insist on the notion of De Roxas, that 
*' Latin makes the real fool ;" but at any rate it 
does not make the real philosopher. — Add to this ; 
of what sort of knowledge of Latin are we speaking ? 
Of one which extends to the writing of Latin. Now 
if Bacon, who could write no Latin, had entertained 
doubts about Religion : must Bacon, on that account, 
Jiave suppressed them? So any College School, 
which could scrape together a Latin programme, 
would have a privilege, which Bacon would not enjoy ? 



LETTER VIII. 87 

I do not find indeed, that Bacon thought like Huarte, 
who thought it direct evidence of a wrong-headed 
bungler, to believe, that he could express himself 
better in a foreign language than in his own. But 
Bacon might perhaps think; I cannot write Latin 
as I would ; and as I can, I will not. — 

If some persons knew, what Latin they write : less 
would write it. It would truly be the case, then, 
that they must An obligation, which perhaps might 
be profitable to the language ; but certainly not to 
the subject. 

And if merely in this respect, where the greater 
good were sacrificed to the less, the unfair law would 
also be not prudent: would it be imprudent only 
in this respects Would it not also be imprudent 
on this account, because it must necessarily awaken 
the suspicion of the common man as to the goodness 
of a subject, which they do not dare to treat openly ? 
of the proof of which, the Latinists would com- 
municate only so much, through their interpreter, as 
they thought serviceable? — Would it not also be 
imprudent, because it increases the evil, which it 
is intended to repair? The objections against Ke- 
ligion are to be written in Latin, in order that they 
may occasion mischief to a less number of people. 
To a less number] Yes to a less number in every 
country, in which the Latin were only in use among 
a certain class : but would it be so in all Europe % 
in the whole world ? Scarcely. For are there not 
in Europe more people who know Latin, and are 



88 LETTER VIII. 

yet incapable to meet and resist every ill impression 
of plausible doubt, than there are weak ones, who 
know not Latin, in each separate country 1 A soul 
is a soul to the devil ; or if he makes any distinc- 
tion, he would be the gainer. He would obtain, for 
instance, instead of the soul of a German ignoramus, 
who could only have been misled by German wri- 
tings, the soul of a learned French or English man. 
He would gain a larded roast, instead of a dry one. 

So the imprudent law would certainly have his, 
the devil's vote : even if it were not besides, un- 
christian ; as may already be inferred, from its being 
unfair. — I understand by unchristian, what is at 
variance with the Spirit of Christianity, — with its 
end. Now the end of Christianity, as far as T, with 
the Reverend Mr. Goeze's permission, understand 
it, is not our salvation, let it come whence it may ; 
but our Salvation, through the medium of our enlighten- 
ment ; which enlightenment is not merely necessary 
as a condition, but as an essential element to our 
salvation; in which after all our entire salvation 
consists. How entirely opposed then to the Spirit 
of Christianity, rather to contribute nothing to the 
enlightenment of so many, than possibly to scandalise 
a few I These few, who never were, never will be 
Christians, who only dream away their unthinking 
life under the name of Christians; this miserable 
portion of Christians must be perpetually made to 
stop the hole, through which the better part wishes 
$o pass to the light. Or if this most miserable 



LETTER Till. 89 

part is not the smallest, must it be spared on 
account of its multitude ? — Then what sort of Chris- 
tianity has been preached hitherto, that the greater 
body does not adhere, as it ought, to the true 
Christianity? — What if some of these nominal 
Christians were scandalised ; what if some of them, 
on account of free-thinking works, written in their 
own language, should even declare, that they no 
longer would be, — what they never were; what 
of that ? Tertullian asks, and I with him : Nonne 
ah ipso Domino quidam discentium scandalizati di- 
verterunt? Whoever, before he begins to discuss, 
or especially to write, thinks himself obliged to 
enquire, whether he may not, perchance, by his 
discussions and writings, here scandalise a weak 
believer, or there harden an unbeliever, or again 
play into the hands of a knave, who is seeking 
fig-leaves :* let him at once renounce all idea of 
discussion, or writing. I would not wish inten- 
tionally to tread upon a worm ; but if it is to be 
accounted a sin, if I accidentally tread on one ; 
I know not how otherwise to help myself, than by 
not stirring at all; by not moving a limb out of 
its place; by ceasing to live. Every movement in 
Nature, developes and disturbs, — brings life and 
death ; brings death to one creature, w T hile it brings 
life to another : were it better there be no death 
and no motion ? or rather, death and motion ? 



What Coleridge called a "wrap-rascal." — Transl. 



90 LETTER VIII. 

And is this the drift of this wish] that the 
enemies of Religion should never be allowed to 
employ any other than the Latin language ; of this 
wish, which some so readily would make into a law ! 
If this is the case already ; and how, think ye, would 
it stand with all investigation of truth, if it really 
became a law] — Let us judge from the claws, 
which spiritual tyranny ventures already to display, 
in one of its most ferocious, but happily still chained 
tigers ! 

With this I aim at what the Reverend Gentle- 
man says upon this point; and who ever does not 
smell, whither all the limitations and conditions 
tend, with and under which " it might still be 
" allowed," to make objections against Religion : he 
has a very bad cold. 

"It may still be allowed," it is stated, "to 
" sensible and steady men, to make discreet objec- 
" tions against the Christian Religion, and even 
" against the Bible." — But on whom is the discri- 
mination to depend % Who is a steady and sensible 
man ? Is only he a sensible man, who has suffi- 
cient intelligence, to weigh the persecution, which 
he will bring upon himself by his freedom of 
thought \ Is he alone a steady man, who willingly 
remains quietly seated, in the comfortable reclin- 
ing chair, in which his office has steadily placed 
him, and therefore heartily wishes, that others too, 
if they cannot sit so comfortably, may nevertheless 
remain as quietly ? Are only those discreet objec- 



LETTER VIII. 91 

tions, which discreetly determine, not to allow the 
matter to come into life ] which discreetly determine, 
only so far to declare themselves, as an answer 
may reasonably be expected'? The latter must be. 
For the Reverend Gentleman continues : " Such 
" a proceeding is necessary, to keep the teacher in 
"breath." — CM only on that account'? Then all 
controversy in Religion is to be only a School- 
exercise, only a sham-fight'? As soon as the Mo- 
derator gives a hint to the Opponent ; as soon as 
the Opponent observes, that the Respondent will 
have nothing to reply, and that Mr. Moderator is 
too hungry, to admit of his answering himself, with 
becoming calmness and decorum ; must the Dis- 
putation cease] must Moderator and Opponent 
hurry off together in a friendly way to the Re- 
freshment room V — But no, certainly not : for the 
Reverend Gentleman further adds ; " and to guard 
" against such times of quiet, as those in which 
"Christianity, from the 9th to the 15th century, 
" had almost fallen to the ground." — Admirable ! 
But does the Reverend Gentleman know, that even 
in these barbarous times more objections against 
the Christian Religion were made, than the Clergy 
were inclined to answer ? Does he reflect that 
these times were so pernicious to the Christian Reli- 
gion, not because no one had any doubt; but be- 
cause no one dared venture to bring them to light 1 
because they were times, such as the Reverend 
Gentleman wishes ours to become. 



LETTER IX. 



Cognitio veritatis omnia falsa, si modo proferantur, etiam qua prius 
inaudita erant, et dijudicare et subvertere idonea est. 

AUGUSTINUS AD DlOSCORUM. 

1778. 



happy times, when the clergy were all in 
all, — thought for us, and ate for us! How gladly 
would the Reverend Gentleman have brought you 
back in triumph! How delighted would he be, 
that the ruling powers of Germany should identify 
themselves with him for this salutary object ! He 
preaches sweet and sour, — he places heaven and 
hell before you. If you will not hear; — you must 
feel. Wit and mother-tongue are the hotbeds, in 
which the seed of rebellion is so readily and so 
quickly matured. To-day a poet, to-morrow a regi- 
cide. Clement, Ravaillac, Damiens are not formed 
in the Confessional, but on Mount Parnassus. 

1 allow myself to be met once more on this 
common place of the Reverend Gentleman. Now, 
if not clear enough already, I will make it thoroughly 
clear, that Mr. Goeze does not at all admit, what 
he seems to admit, and that these are the identical 



LETTER IX. 



93 



ckws, which the tiger is so angry at being able 
to strike only into the wooden bars of his cage. 

I say then : to be allowed, with his permission, 
to make objections against Religion and the Bible, 
against what he calls Eeligion and Bible, is only 
nonsense. He does, and does not give permission: 
for he guards it with clauses on all sides, in so 
strict and pettifogging a way, that one must beware 
of making use of it. 

The clause, with regard to the language, I have 
sufficiently elucidated. I have also touched upon 
the clauses respecting the persons and the object. 
But there still remains the clause in reference to 
the point itself, which the objections are only to 
be able to meet; and this more especially deserves 
that we dwell upon it for a moment, the more fair 
it sounds, the less, at first sight, would one be likely 
to take exception to it. " Only the attacking party," 
are the words of the Eeverend Gentleman, " must 
"not have the liberty to slander as blockheads, as 
"knaves, and as resurrection -men, the holy men 
"■of God, of whom the whole of Christendom 
"believes, that they spake and wrote, moved by 
"the Holy Ghost" 

As we have said, this sounds so reasonable, that 
one might almost be ashamed, to take any exception 
to it. And yet it is, at the bottom, nothing more 
than trickery, or paltriness. For only let us perfectly 
understand one another. Does the Eeverend Gentle- 
man only desire that the attacking party should not 



94 LETTER IX. 

have the liberty of employing such abusive names, 
as he puts in his mouth, instead of reasons? Or 
does he wish also that the attacking party should 
also not have the liberty, to touch upon such things 
and facts, from the proof of which it would follow, 
that these names apply in a measure to the Apostles ? 
This is the question, which he of course has not 
overlooked. If he only desires the former, his 
demand is most just ; but it implies a paltriness, 
far above which the Christian would wish to place 
himself. Empty abuse does not vex him, whether 
it be directed against himself, or his faith. Calm 
contempt is all which he opposes to it. Woe unto 
his adversary, who encounters him, and has nothing 
better to combat with ! 

But if the Reverend Gentleman also desires the 
latter: he employs tricks, which only a theological 
poltroon would so far debase himself as to use ; and 
every one must oppose himself to him, who has 
the truth of the Christian Religion at heart. — 
For what? Has the Christian Religion unsound 
parts, which absolutely endure no touching? which 
one dares not even ventilate? Or if it has no 
such parts, why should its friends be perpetually 
hearing the reproach, — "that one does not dare 
"say all, which one could say against it"? This 
reproach is so lowering, — so tormenting ! I repeat 
it: a theological poltroon alone can fail to wish 
to see an end put to it, — -can through his conduct 
any longer give just occasion to it. Not that I 



LETTER IX. 95 

should prefer the theological bully, who in the 
middle of the pavement snaps his fingers at the 
people-shunning free-thinker, who slinks along under 
the houses and calls out in defiance : " Come out, 
"if you have anything to say"! I cannot bear 
either; and what is most remarkable is, that not 
unfrequently poltroon and bully are united in one 
person. But I believe, that the true Christian 
neither plays the one, nor the other; too distrustful 
of his reason, — too proud of his sensibility. 

So much with regard to the requisition of the 
Eeverend Gentleman, considered generally. I come 
to the particular case, which he has in his mind. 
For it must be my anonymous, who makes use of 
a freedom, which he ought not to have. 

But where then has he made use of it ? Where 
has he slandered the Apostles as blockheads, knaves 
and resurrection-men % I defy the Eeverend Gen- 
tleman to point out to me a single passage in the 
Fragments, where he throws about him such honor- 
able titles. You and you alone, Reverend Sir, have 
done so, to whom they have first occurred either 
through the tongue, or from the pen. He must, in 
the name of the anonymous, slander the Apostles, 
in order that he might slander the anonymous. 

And that it may not be thought, as though I wished 
to defend my anonymous merely by shewing, that 
those titles of honour are not to be found literally 
in him! My anonymous has not even positively 
asserted anything about the Apostles, which could 



96 LETTER IX. 

make them deserving of them; nowhere has he 
ascribed to them the substance of the same. 

It is not true, that my anonymous positively 
says : " Christ is not risen, but his disciples have 
" stolen his corpse." He has neither convicted, 
nor wished to convict the Apostles of this robbery. 
He is too well convinced, that he could not convict 
them of this. For a suspicion, — even a very plau^ 
sible one, is very far from being a proof. 

My anonymous merely says : this suspicion, which 
his brain has not hatched, — which is derived from 
the New Testament itself, — this suspicion is not so 
fully removed and refuted, by Matthew's recital of 
the guarding of the sepulchre, but that it might 
still remain probable and credible; in as much as 
the above mentioned narrative is not only highly 
suspicious in its internal construction, but also an 
aira% \ey6fievov, such as deserves little credit in 
history generally, and here so much the less, be- 
cause those, who were most interested in believing 
it, never trusted to appeal to it. 

Who does not see then, that it is here less a 
question about the truth of the matter, than the 
credible nature of the narrative ? And seeing that 
the narration of a matter perfectly true may appear 
very incredible : who does not see, that this incre- 
dible nature of that truth is only so far prejudicial > 
as one wishes to make the truth, singly and solely * 
depend on the narration? 

And allowing, that my anonymous had not kept 



LETTER IX. 97 

within these bounds, he would not only have wished 
to shew, what every good Catholic can believe and 
maintain without demur, that in the written narra- 
tion of the Evangelists and apostles singly and solely, 
certain sacred occurrences do not appear so unques- 
tionable, as to require no further corroboration; 
allowing that he had accepted the probable as true, 
the credible as undeniable, that he had regarded 
it as absolutely proved, that the Apostles had re^- 
moved the body of Jesus : yet I am still convinced, 
that he in the case of these men, through whom so 
unspeakably much good has come into the world, 
as he himself does not deny, that he, I say, would 
have spared these, to us in every respect dear men, 
the abusive names deceivers, knaves, resurrection-men, 
with which the Reverend Gentleman is so ready. 
And it is true, he would not only have spared them 
out of courtesy, — not only out of care not to offend : 
but he would have spared them, because he must 
have been convinced, that it would have been going 
too far. 

For if it be true, that moral actions, let them 
happen in ever so different times, among ever so 
different peoples, considered in themselves, remain 
the same; nevertheless the same actions have not 
always the same appellations, and it is unjust, to 
give to any one of them another appellation, than 
that, which they were wont to bear in their times, 
and among their people. Now it is demonstrated 
and proved, that the oldest and most revered 



98 LETTER IX. 

Fathers of the Church held a deception, practised 
with a good intent, to be no deception, and have not 
scrupled to attribute this same mode of thinking 
to the Apostles themselves. Whoever wishes to 
read this point laid down and made clear by an. 
unsuspected Theologian himself, let him read Ribov's 
Programme de CEconomia patrum. The passages are 
undeniable, which Hibov collects, even with pro- 
fusion, in order to prove, that the Fathers, nearly 
without exception, were firmly of opinion, integrum 
omnino Doctoribus et ccvtus Christiani Antistibus esse, 
ut dolos versent, falsa veris intermisceant et imprimis 
religionis hostes fallant, dummodo veritaiis commodis 
et utilitati inserviant. Likewise the passages of the 
other kind, where the Fathers attribute to the 
Apostles themselves a like olKovofjulav, a like falsitatem 
dispensativam, are just as undeniable. What Jerome 
among others asserts of St, PauP is so naif, that 
it strikes even the naif Bibov himself, which 
ho w ever not the less remains the real opinion of 
Jerome. 

Let it not be said, that this, now to us, so strange 
a representation of the uprightness of the first 
Fathers and Apostles, concerns only undue advantage 
in exposition, only in the words. Words and actions 
lie not so far apart, as is generally thought, Who- 
ever is capable, in spite of knowing better and of 
conscience, of distorting a passage, is capable of 

• Paulus in testimoniis, quae sumit de veteri testamento, quam artifex, 
quam prudens, quam dissimulator est ejus quod agit ! 



LETTER IX. 



99 



every other deception; can bear false testimony, 
can interpolate writings, can invent facts, can hold 
as allowable every means of confirming them. 

God forbid, that I should wish it to be under- 
stood, that the Apostles were capable of all these 
things because the Fathers held them to be capable 
of one ! I will only suggest the question : whether 
even in the spirit, in which we judge of them now 
in respect to this one thing, a candid man would 
not be obliged, at any rate, to judge of them in 
respect to the rest, if it really were incumbent upon 
them. 

And such a candid person my anonymous most 
assuredly was. He has not demanded in heavy 
money the payment of any debt, which was con- 
tracted in light money. He has not judged any 
crime, committed under more indulgent laws, by more 
recent and more severe ones. He has assigned 
no appellation, which did not belong to the abstract 
notion of the deed in their time, to the concrete 
notion of the doer in our time. He might always 
believe in his heart that we are deceived, but he 
has taken great care not to say that we have been 
deceived by deceivers. 

Every one, who makes my anonymous assert 
this last, because he can bring home to him, that 
he has believed the first, is himself guilty of de- 
ception, in order to excite a people, who are capable 
of making no distinction. But I leave it undecided, 
whether this object belongs to such as justify 

H2 



100 LETTER IX. 

a deception. At least I do not yet see, what benefit 
is to arise from it ; and I must first discover, whether 
the people themselves of the present time, are not 
already wiser and more sensible, than the preachers, 
who would so willingly set them on. 

Mr. Goeze knows very well that my anonymous 
in reality only maintains, that the Apostles did 
precisely, what all legislators, all founders of new 
religions and states thought it expedient to do. But 
that does not so clearly strike the people, for whom 
he writes and preaches. So he speaks to the people 
the language of the people, and bawls out, that 
my anonymous slanders the Apostles as deceivers 
and knaves. — This is sonorous ! this produces effect ! 
— But, as we said, perhaps it does not. For 
even the most insignificant people, if only well 
directed by their rulers, become from time to time 
more enlightened, more moral and better; instead 
of, as is the fundamental principle with certain 
preachers, eternally remaining stationary at the 
same point of morality and religion, at which 
their forefathers stood many hundred years ago. 
They do not tear themselves from the people, 
but the people at length tear themselves loose from 
them. 



LETTER X. 



Non leve est, quod mihi impingit tantce urbis pontifex. 

HlEEON. ADV. KUFFINUM. 

1778. 



I have proved that the advantages, which Re- 
ligion derives objectively from the doubts and ob- 
jections, with which the, as yet unsubjugated, reason 
assails it, are so essential and great, that all the 
disadvantage subjectively, from which more is feared, 
than really arises, deserves not to be taken into 
consideration; which is quite clear, because the 
subjective disadvantage only exists, until the ob- 
jective advantage begins to manifest itself, in which 
moment henceforth, the objective advantage begins 
to be also an advantage subjectively. — I have proved 
that, accordingly, the Church, which understands 
its true interest, cannot entertain the idea of limiting, 
in any way, the liberty of combatting Religion; 
either in regard to language or persons, by whom 
alone, and in which alone, the combat may be al- 
lowed. I have proved, that, least of all, should an 
exception of points be allowed to be made, which 
the combat should not touch ; because thereby a 



102 LETTER X. 

suspicion would arise, which would certainly bring 
more injury upon Religion, than the combatting 
of the excepted points themselves could ever 
occasion. — 

If it is clear from this, that the Church must never 
wish to have the right to stifle in their birth, or 
never even to allow to come to their birth, writings 
directed against her, of whatever nature they may 
be, it is then through the better teaching of their 
authors; if these authors themselves, in whom it 
only prosecutes their error, enjoy all the indulgence 
from it, which one so willingly extends to them, 
who against their will, which only seeks to compass 
our ruin, do us good; how can it regard him as 
its enemy, in whom it has not even to prosecute 
his own error, (of Lessing) who only makes known 
the errors of others, (of Reimarus) in order to pro- 
cure to it, the sooner, the better, the advantage to be 
expected from it] How can the editor of a free- 
thinking book have to apprehend resentment from 
it, with which it would not regard even the author 
of it 1 ? When Jerome translated from the Greek, a 
work which was, according to his own judgment, the 
highest degree injurious to the true Christian Reli- 
gion — it was the books of Origen nepl apx&v — let 
it be well observed " translated" ! And to translate is 
certainly more, than merely to publish. — As he trans- 
lated these dangerous writings with the intention of 
rescuing them from the misrepresentations and muti- 
lations of another translator, Ruffinus, that is, to bring 



LETTER X. 103 

them before the Latin world, in their full force, with 
all their seductions ; and a certain Schola tyrannica 
upbraided him on this account, as if he had a very 
culpable offence upon his soul: what was his 
answer ? O impudentiam singularem ! Accusant rnedi- 
cum, quod venena prodiderit. — I confess I do not 
know, what he precisely meant to say by that 
Schola tyrannica, And it would be astonishing, if 
there had been already such people among the 
Christian teachers as Goeze f — But I have given 
a similar answer for myself: "Am I to be supposed 
" to have brought the plague into the country, be- 
" cause I pointed out the poison, which lurked in 
" the darkness, to the council of health V Truly, 
when I began to publish the Fragments, I did not 
know, or at any rate did not mention, the circum- 
stance, which I here seem to wish to use in justi- 
fication of an undertaking, in which I neither took 
nor could take it at all into account. I did not 
know, or did not mention, that the book is extant 
entire, is extant in several places, and produces 
no less effect in manuscript on that account, because 
the effect is not striking. But I only seem to wish 
to employ this circumstance in my justification. 

I am even without it, sufficiently justified by 
the fact, that I, when I had made known, on some 
occasion, a very innocent passage from the work of 
my anonymous, was requested, to communicate more 
of it. Yes, I will lay myself still more open. 

I will at once acknowledge, that I even without 



104 LETTER X. 

any request, would have done what I have. I should 
only perhaps have done it a little later. 

In truth, I have quite a superstitious regard 
for every written hook, especially one only exis- 
tent in manuscript, from which I perceive, that 
the author desires either to instruct or gratify the 
world. I lament, when I see, that death, or other 
causes, neither more nor less welcome to an active 
man, can frustrate so many good intentions; and 
I feel myself so far in the position, in which every 
man, worthy of the name, finds himself, at the sight 
of a child exposed. He is not content, with not 
absolutely destroying him, with letting it lie un- 
injured and undisturbed, where he finds it ; he has 
it conveyed or carries it into the Foundling Hospital, 
that it may at least receive baptism and a name. 
He would do one rather than the other ; in propor- 
tion as the one is more agreeable to him than the 
other ; according as the one squeezes his finger more 
than the other* Just so at least I desired — for what 
would be the consequence, if on that account so 
many more ragamuffins, should become worked at 
in the same way, that they may be capable of 
bearing the traces of an immortal mind? — at least 
I desired, to be able to bring all and every exposed 
birth of the mind, at once, into the great Foundling 
Hospital appointed for them, the Printing-office : 
and if I myself only introduce, in reality, a few, the 

• Lessing seems to allude to the fairy ring which squeezed the Jlnger % 
to convey a moral lesson,— Transl, 



LETTER X. 105 

fault certainly is not mine alone I do what I can; 
and let every one only do as much. The cause itself 
does not often rest with me alone, why I prefer 
bringing to it this, sooner than that, why I must 
let my finger be squeezed by the more healthy and 
friendly foundling : but here, in most cases, so many 
little unobserved causes work together, that one 
may well say, habent sua fata libelli. 

Yet never have I been able to reflect on this my 
weakness, — through which, I do not know whether 
I should say, I was born to be a librarian, or 
neglected by nature to be a librarian, — never, I 
say without esteeming my peculiar position a fortu- 
nate one, I am very fortunate, in being a librarian 
here, and not elsewhere. I am very fortunate, that 
I am this nobleman's librarian, and no other's. — 
Among the heathen Philosophers, who wrote in 
the first centuries against Christianity, Porphyry 
must undoubtedly have been the most dangerous, 
as he was, according to all conjecture, the most 
acute and learned. For his fifteen books tcara Xptcr- 
Tiavobv were so carefully sought out and destroyed, 
by order of Constantine and Theodosius, that not 
even a single fragment of them has come clown to 
us. Even the thirty and more authors, who had 
written expressly against him, among whom very 
great names are found, are lost on that account ; 
probably because they had cited too many and too 
lengthy passages of their opponent, who was to be 
put completely out of the world. — But if it be true, 



106 LETTER X. 

as Isaac Vossius wishes to persuade Salvius* that 
nevertheless one copy of these formidable books of 
Porphyry is still somewhere extant ; namely in the 
Medicean library at Florence, where however it is 
kept so secret, that nobody must read it, — nobody 
communicate the smallest portion of it to the world : 
truly then I would not willingly be librarian there at 
Florence, though I could likewise be Grand Duke. 
Or what is more, I would only be so on condition, 
that I might immediately remove a prohibition so in- 
jurious to truth and to Christianity, that I might 
immediately have Porphyry printed in my Ducal 
Palace, and immediately give up the Grand Duchy, 
which is already burdensome to me, even in idea, to 
its lawful owner. — 

Abelard is the man, who was in my mind in 
a former passage, when J said, that, even in those 
barbarous times, more objections were made against 
Religion, than the monks were pleased to answer, 
who, for the sake of their loved shortness and ease,t 
were ready to send him at once to the devil, who 
ventured to bring his objections to light. For are 
we to believe, that in spite of the controversies which 
St Bernard started against different writings of 
Abelard; in spite of the collection, which Amboise, 
to his no slight danger, made of Abelard's writings ; 



• Ritmeicri Conringiana Epistolica, p. 71. 

f The Monks loved hours of study to be short and the subject easy. — 

Transl. 



LETTER X. 107 

in spite of the gleanings, which Martene and Dnrand 
and B. Petz have added to this collection, that, I 
say, the work of Abelard is still wanting, from which 
his religious opinions must be principally discovered? 
D'Achery had found it, in I know not what library, 
and had taken a copy of it, and was willing to have 
it printed. But & Acliery either went, or was 
obliged to go into deliberation on the matter with 
other learned men, — also Benedictines without doubt, 
— and so nothing could come of the printing ; the 
happily discovered work of Abelard, in quo, genio 
suo indulgens, omnia Christiana religionis mysteria in 
utramque partem versat was condemned to perpetual 
darkness* D'Achery's copy came into the hands 
of Martene and Durand ; and these men, who had 
rescued from destruction so much historical and 
theological refuse, had just as little heart, to preserve 
a little bit more of refuse for the world; because 
it was only philosophical refuse, — Poor pamphlet! 
If you fell into my hands, I would as surely have 
you printed, as I am no Benedictine! — But I 
could almost wish to be one, if one could only, as 
such, have the opportunity of seeing more such 
manuscripts. What if I were expelled from the 
order, the very first year 1 

And that I certainly should be. For I should 
wish to have too much printed, which the order 
would refuse permission to bring forward. The old 

• Thes. Anecdot. T. V. Prsef. 



108 LETTER X. 

Lutheran would too often reproach me ; and I should 
never be able to persuade myself, that a maxim, 
which is so tolerable to the papal hierarchy, could 
be also tolerable to true Christianity. 

" Yet all this implies only a wish to excuse a 
" misdeed, through the desire, by which one is irre- 
" sistibly impelled to commit it. For if it is your 
" weakness, to take in hand deserted manuscripts, 
" then you must suffer for your weakness. Enough 
" no part whatever of this MSS. should have been 
" published, because it is quite as bad as the Toldos 
Jeschu.^* Well remarked ! And so likewise the 
Toldos Jeschu ought not to have been printed] 
And were they, who made it known to us, and made 
it known by the press, no Christians ? 

It is true that he who first upbraided the Chris- 
tians with it, was only a baptized Jew. But Por- 
chetus ? But Luther ? And Wagenseil, who thought 
himself obliged to rescue the Hebrew original ! O the 
the indiscreet, the malicious Wagenseil !| But for 
this scarce one in a thousand Jews would have been 
able to read the Toldos Jeschu ; now all can read it. 
And what besides will he one day have heavily to 
answer before the judgement-seat of God, the 
wicked Wagenseil! The abominable Voltaire has 



* VW^ mib^n "History of Jesus." The weakest of ancient 
Jewish treatises against Christianity. The other treatises, viz : ]in^D 
"victory," by Rabbi Lipman ; [and Rabbi Isaac's " Strengthening of the 
Faith," are far more interesting and important. — Transl. 

f In his Tela ignea Satance, 



LETTER X. 109 

made his scurrilous extracts from this edition, which 
he would have been unable to do, if he had been 
obliged to look out the book in the old print of 
Raymundus or Porchetus. — 

Is it not true, Reverend Sir 1 I add : which 
Voltaire also would have been obliged to let alone, 
if Wagenseil had had the obnoxious book printed 
in Hebrew and German,* instead of Hebrew and 
Latin. This might serve as a little example, of 
what general benefit it is, when the works against 
Religion are only to be had in Latin. Is it not so, 
Reverend Sir 1 

Meanwhile, Reverend Sir, Wagenseil has toler- 
ably well defended his undertaking in the ample 
preface to his " Tela ignea Satance." And perhaps 
you will allow me to adduce one single passage 
from it, in which I think that I also am included ? 
It is that, which, in a few words embraces nearly 
all the substance of the whole preface : — 

Neque vero, non legere tantum hsereticorum 
scripta, sed et opiniones illorum manifestare, libro- 
rumque ab iis compositorum, sive fragmenta aut 
compendia, sive integrum contextum, additis quidem 
plerumque confutationibus, aliquando tamen etiam 
sine iis, publice edere, imo et blasphemias impi- 
orum hominum recitare, viri docti piique olim et 
nunc fas esse arbitrati sunt. 



* For the Hebrew and German, languages were among the very few 
branches of learning, in which Voltaire was not accomplished. — Transl. 



LETTER XI. 



Ne hoc quidem nudum est intuendum, qualem causam vir bonus, sed 
etiam quare, et qua mente defendat. 

QUINTILIANUS. 

1778. 



But the Reverend Gentleman will grow angry, 
that I pursue him step by step, till I get him at 
last in a corner, where he cannot escape from me. 
He will already, before I have quite hemmed him 
in, endeavour to escape me, and say : " Ah, who 
" is speaking then of mere printing ? He might, 
" it is true, be thus excused. The real crime consists 
" in the fact, that the Editor of the Fragments has 
"also undertaken to advocate the cause of the 
" author." 

To advocate? To advocate the cause of the 
Author ? — What advocacy then had my anonymous, 
which I have undertaken in his behalf? The 
advocacy is the privilege to be allowed to conduct 
certain suits before certain courts. I am not aware 
that my anonymous has any where had such a 
privilege. — One is to understand his privilege, in 
this, in defending the healthy human understanding 
before the public. Nevertheless every one has this 



LETTER XI. Ill 

privilege by Nature, every one gives it himself of 
himself; no one requires first to accept it from 
another. It is neither a butcher's-stall* nor a 
parsonage. But to find fault so with the "Reverend 
Gentleman's words! To scrutinize so narrowly in 
him, what he says ; and not much rather, what 
he wishes to say! He wishes to say, that I have 
undertaken to be the advocate of the anonymous; 
have laid myself out as such. This he means to 
say; and I bet ten to one, that no wheel-barrow- 
driver understands him otherwise. — 

And so he has said it! — If I only see, where 
the way would lead further. For here also, streets 
run towards all quarters of the heavens. — It is 
true, if I knew, what sort of notion the "Reverend 
Gentleman has of an advocate, I would soon find 
the straight path, to dive into his thoughts. 

If the Reverend Gentleman should here, for the 
novelty's sake, form the right conception'? If he 
should know and mean the real advocate I mean 
under this name the honest man, who is thoroughly 
acquainted with the law, and undertakes no suit, 
but those of whose justice he is convinced] — No, 
no; he cannot mean him. For I have nowhere 
said, that I hold the whole cause of my anonymous, 
entirely as it is, to be good and true. I have never 
said so; much rather I have said just the reverse. 
I have said and proved, that, if the anonymous is 

* Which require a licence to hold them.— Transl. 



112 LETTER XI. 

right in so many single points, still in the whole 
that does not follow therefrom, which he seems 
to wish. 

I venture boldly to add, what will appear like 
a kind of boast. Enough, that candid readers know 
cases, where such extorted boasting is necessary ; 
and readers of feeling are fully aware that the 
case in which I find myself here, is by no means 
one of slight importance. — 

I have not only expressly said, that I am not 
pledged to the opinions of my anonymous; and up 
to the period, when I undertook the publication 
of the Fragments, I have never written, or openly 
maintained the slightest thing, which could expose 
me to the suspicion, of being a secret enemy of the 
Christian Religion. On the other hand, I have 
written more than one trifle, in which I have not 
only exhibited the Christian Eeligion generally, with 
regard to its teaching and teachers, in the best light, 
but also especially have defended the Orthodox, 
Lutheran, Christian Eeligion against Eoman Catho- 
lics, Socinians and Neologians. 

The Eeverend Gentleman himself is acquainted 
with the greatest part of these, and he has been 
kind enough, before now, to express his approbation 
by word of mouth and in print. How is it that 
he now first recognizes the devil in me, who had 
clad himself, if not in the garb of an angel of light* 
yet at least, in that of a man, not of the worst stamp 1 
Is it possible that I am actually transformed, since 



LETTER XI. 



113 



I no longer breathe the same air as himself? Can 
we suppose that the various acquirements and better 
views, which, since our separation, I have had as 
much desire as opportunity to acquire, have made 
me only more short-sighted and worse % Am I now 
first carelessly to founder on the rocks, which I have 
avoided in the stormy age of boisterous surges, when 
softer winds* waft me to the harbour, in which I 
hope to land as joyfully, as he does'? — Certainly not, 
certainly not ; I am still the same man ; but the 
Reverend Gentleman sees me no longer with the 
same eye. His choler has got the better of his sight, 
and the bile overflowed — where 1 Who will believe 
it, if I tell it ! Tantane animis ccelestibus ires ? — 
But I must not serve the dessert before the soup. 

I come back to the advocacy and say : the real, 
proper advocate of my anonymous, who should be 
one heart and one soul with his client with regard 
to the pending controversy, I neither am, nor can 
be. Nay, I cannot even be the man, who has only 
a slight glimpse of the justice of his client's cause, 
and nevertheless commits himself at a venture on 
the sea of chicanery, either from friendship, or other 
circumstances; firmly resolved, to take advantage 
of every gust, in order to land him somewhere in 
safety. For the anonymous was not my friend ; 
and I know nothing in the world, which should 
induce me, to prefer occupying myself with his 

* The passions of youth having subsided.— Transl. 

I 



114 LETTER XI. 

writings, rather than with fifty others, which would 
not occasion me so much annoyance, and trouble; 
if it were not my desire, as soon as possible, even 
in my own life-time, to see them refuted. 

I solemnly affirm, the avowal of this desire, though 
I have made hitherto little parade of it, is no empty 
subterfuge. But I confess this desire is interested; 
highly interested. I myself would willingly take 
with me out of the world somewhat of the refutation. 
I am in want of it. For it was only right that I, 
as librarian, should read the Fragments of my 
anonymous; and it was quite natural, that they, 
in several parts, both embarrassed and made me 
uneasy. They contained so many different things, 
which my little bit of acuteness and learning, was 
insufficient properly to explain. I see here and 
there, for a thousand miles, no answer; and the 
Keverend Gentleman cannot imagine, how sorely 
such an embarrassment for an answer disquiets a 
truth-loving spirit. 

Am I then nothing to myself? Have I no duty 
to myself, to seek my tranquillisation where I think 
to find it ? And where could I better expect to 
find it, than with the public? I perfectly under- 
stand, that an individual is bound to sacrifice his 
own temporal well-being to the well-being of the 
many. But is it so with his eternal welfare ? What 
before God and man can bind me, rather not to 
wish to free myself from tormenting doubts, than 
through their publication to offend men weak of 
faith'? — Let the Reverend Gentleman answer this. 



LETTER XI. 115 

Certainly I have had no special permission, out 
of the literary treasures committed to me, to com- 
municate to the world fiery coals of this kind. I 
thought this special permission to be included in 
the general one, which my most gracious patron 
has been pleased to grant me. If, through this 
belief, I have shown myself unworthy of his confi- 
dence, I lament my misfortune, and am liable to 
punishment. Most willingly would I fall into the 
hands of candid justice, if God only will protect 
me from the hands of the angry priest. And what 
moreover will this angry priest say, if I take this 
opportunity to avow, that the anonymous himself 
was not in a hurry to come to light. That I have 
now dragged him to light, is not only without, but 
indeed against his will; I am led to apprehend 
this from the beginning of a preface, which had 
especially come to view before I determined to in- 
troduce him to the world. 

It runs thus: u The writing, for which I am 
" preparing the preface, was composed by me many 
" years ago. Yet as occasion offered by repeated 
" reading, I have added in many places, in others 
w shortened or altered. Only my own satisfaction 
" was the motive from the very beginning, for 
" writing down my thoughts ; and I never afterwards 
" was inclined, to lead the world astray, or give 
"it cause of uneasiness, through my views. The 
" work may lie concealed, for the use of intelligent 
"friends; with my consent it should not be made 

12 



116 



LETTER XI. 



"public through the press, before the times are 
" more enlightened. Better the mass of the people 
" remain awhile in error, than that I, though 
" without my fault, should offend them with truths, 
" and rouse them to a furious religious zeal. Better 
" the wise man, for quiet's sake, should bow to the 
" prevailing opinions and customs, — bear with them 
" and be silent ; than that he should make himself 
" and others unhappy, through too hasty a manifesta- 
" tion. For I must say beforehand, the positions 
" contained herein are not in the nature of a cate- 
" chism, but remain within the limits of a reasonable 
"adoration of God, and practice of philanthropy 
" and virtue. But as I wished fully to satisfy myself 
'* and my rising doubts ; I could not but funda- 
" mentally investigate the faith, which had caused 
"me so many stumbling-blocks, whether it could 
" consist with the rules of truth, or not." 

Luther and all the saints ! Eeverend Sir, what 
have you read here ! Is it not true 1 You never 
could have thought me so criminal'? — The anony- 
mous, with all his free-thinking, was still so honour- 
able, that he was unwilling to mislead the world 
by Ms own views, and I, I do not hesitate, to lead 
it astray through the views of another. The anony- 
mous was so peaceful a man, that he wished to 
give no occasion to uneasiness, and I, I overlook 
all the disquiet, of which you best know, Eeverend 
Sir, how painful it becomes to a faithful and laborious 
pastor of souls, to rouse it only in one single town 



LETTER XL 117 

to the honour of our most holy religion. The 
anonymous was so guarded a man, that he wished 
to offend no man with truth ; and I, I do not believe 
at all in any such offence ; firmly convinced, that 
not truths, which one brings forward merely for 
investigation, but those alone, which one would 
forthwith bring into practice, are calculated to excite 
the common people to a furious religious zeal. The 
anonymous was so prudent a man, that he desired 
to make neither himself nor others unhappy, by too 
hasty manifestations ; and I, I as a madman, ven- 
ture first my own security, because I am of opinion, 
that manifestations, if only well-founded, cannot be 
made too soon to the human race. My anonymous, 
who wrote, I know not when, thought, that the 
times must be more enlightened, before what he 
held as truth, could be openly preached : and I, I 
believe, that the times cannot become more enlight- 
ened, in order to investigate previously, whether that 
which he held to be truth, is really so. 

It is all true, Eeverend Sir; it is all true. If 
only there did not lie at the bottom of the praise- 
worthy modesty and foresight of the anonymous, 
too much confidence in his own demonstration, — 
too much contempt for the common man, — too much 
mistrust in his age ! 

If only, as a consequence to these considerations, 
he had rather destroyed his manuscript, than left 
them for the use of intelligent friends!— Or do 
you also think, Keverend Sir, that it is immaterial, 



118 LETTER XI. 

what the intelligent secretly believe, if only the 
people, the dear people, continue nicely in the 
track, in which alone the Clergy know how to 
lead them 1 Do you think so % 



LETTER XII. 



Qui auctorem libri dogmaticum dbsconditum mihi revelat, non tarn utilitati 
meoz, quam curiositati servit : immo non raro damnum mihi affert, 
locum faciens proejudicio auctoritatis. 

Heumannus de libr. an. et pseud. 

1778. 



The complaint at my manner of disputing, I 
could only answer in this same manner; and I am 
satisfied that the Reverend Gentleman makes my 
answer itself a proof of his complaint. Why should 
I not, with good intent, give him still more proofs 
of a complaint, which I despise % 

But the imputation that I have honoured the 
anonymous with unmerited and unmeasured pane- 
gyrics, with the doubly roguish intention, of in- 
sinuating a favourable predilection for him into the 
minds of shallow readers, and to frighten the 
opponents, who might array themselves against him : 
this charge is more serious, and merits a more 
serious answer. It is only a pity, that I am not 
in a position to make this more serious answer so 
luminous. For to be able to do this, the whole 
work of the anonymous must already lie before 



120 LETTER XII. 

the eyes of the world, because all my eulogies, 
wholly and solely, refer to, and have arisen out of 
one characteristic, of the same. And out of which? 
out of such an one, which may also be very well 
imagined of a work, which, in the main, shoots 
very wide of the mark. I have called it a candid, 
earnest, profound, argumentative, learned work: a 
number of qualities, out of which the truth of 
the subject therein treated by no means follows; 
and which I may easily attribute to the author, 
without taking him up and recommending him on 
that account as a man, on whom one may rely in 
all points. And these eulogies also by no means 
set forth, that I am intimately acquainted with him, 
or know him by several works: much less that I 
know or have known him personally. 

For, however irritating it may have been to the 
Eeverend Gentleman, that I have said plainly, " my 
" anonymous is of such weight, that in all kinds 
" of learning, seven Goezes are not capable of weigh- 
" ing one-seventh part of him:" lam confident of 
being able to make good this assertion, out of that 
part of his work, which is in my hands. Only the 
Eeverend Gentleman must not extend what I say 
of all kinds of learning to all the minutics of these 
kinds. Thus it might, for instance, be particularly 
difficult for me to prove that my anonymous had 
just as extended and profound a knowledge of the 
Low-German Bibles, as the Eeverend Gentleman. 
Even the different editions of the Lutheran Bible 



LETTER XII. 121 

translation could scarcely have been so perfectly 
known to him, as to the Reverend Gentleman; 
who has made such extraordinary discoveries in 
them, that he can explain to a hair, how much 
with each edition the orthodoxy of the blessed man 
had grown. But all these are only little particles 
of dust out of literary history, against which my 
anonymous would probably have to stake seven 
times seven as many other little particles of dust, 
in order to prove me no liar. And so with all the 
other branches of knowledge! Even with those, 
which the anonymous did not really, but only 
virtually possess. The reason is clear. He was a 
man of original thought; and it is only given to 
men of original thought, to survey the whole field 
of learning, and to know how to find every path 
of the same, as soon as it is worth while to tread it. 

What infinitesimal portion of such an intellect 
has fallen to the lot of the Reverend Gentleman, 
is left to his own unbiassed judgment. Suffice it 
that seven times seven makes only forty-nine; and 
even a forty-ninth part of my anonymous is worth 
all high esteem and seven times more than is ex- 
pected, in all places and ends of Christendom, in a 
Reverend or Right Reverend. 

But stay! I have called my anonymous also an 
honourable, irreproachable man ; and does this indeed 
presuppose, that I know him intimately and person- 
ally 1 — Not so either ! And without much sheltering 
myself under the Quilibet proesumitur, $c. t I will 



1.22 LETTER XII. 

only say at once, what grounds I have found in 
his work, to do him this justice also. For instance ; 
though my anonymous confessedly sets aside all 
revealed religion : yet is he on that account so little 
a man without any religion, that I absolutely know 
no one, in whom I have found such true, com- 
prehensive, and warm conceptions of mere rational 
religion, as in him. The whole of the first book 
of his work exhibits these conceptions; and how 
much rather would I have brought this first book 
to light, than another Fragment, which his over- 
hasty opponents have forced from me. Not so 
much, because the speculative truths of reasonable 
religion are there set in a stronger light by new 
and more acute proofs; but much more, because 
it is there shown with unusual clearness, what in- 
fluence these truths must have upon our duties, 
if rational religion is to pass into a rational service 
of God. All which he says of this influence parti- 
cularly, carries the most unmistakeable sign, that 
it has flowed from just as enlightened a head, as 
pure heart; and I cannot possibly imagine, that in 
this head with these exalted views, in this heart 
with these noble dispositions, mad, wilful error, 
petty, selfish affections can abide and prevail. 
In eodem pectore, says Quintilian, nullum est hones- 
torum turpiumque consortium ; et cogitare optima 
simul ac deterrima non magis est unius animi, quam 
ejusdem hominis bonum esse ac malum. — This, this 
was the reason, why I felt myself justified to call 



LETTER XII. 123 

my anonymous an honourable, irreproachable man, 
without having evidences of it from his private life. 

It is true I once thought, that I recognized him 
in the person of the Bible translator of Wertheim ; 
and not long ago the unasked for assertion of a 
respectable man here might have strengthened me 
in this belief. This man had before cultivated much 
intercourse with Schmid; and I have his written 
testimony in my hands. But Mr. Mascho had, by 
so many conclusions, a priori, so powerfully com- 
batted my delusion, or whatever he may take it for, 
that I really could have no respect for such con- 
clusions in rebus facti, if I did not at least become 
doubtful. It is true several of these conclusions 
are somewhat lame ; for instance, that which is taken 
from Wolf's Philosophy, which Schmid had so com- 
pletely made his own, and of which in my anony- 
mous no trace is to be found. For with permission 
of Mr. Mascho, the just cited first book is founded 
entirely on Wolf's definitions ; and if in all the 
rest, the strict mathematical method is less apparent, 
the subject matter only is in fault, which was in- 
capable of it. I must likewise honestly acknowledge 
to Mr. Mascho, that I do not see, how my assertion 
that the MS. of my anonymous is at least thirty years 
old, is on that account untenable, because men- 
tion is there made of Wetstein, and of the passage 
1 John v. 7. It is true, Wetstein's New Testament 
first came out in 1751 ; but the Prolegomena had 
appeared about 1730, and the controversy about the 



124 LETTER XII. 

passage in John is still older. But what good would 
it do, if I were allowed to be right in these little 
matters ? I, for my part, as soon as I observed, that 
I had been too hasty in my conjecture about Schmidt 
resolved, never again to indulge in any such con- 
jecture. Yes, I was henceforth determined, even 
if I became perfectly acquainted with the name, 
nevertheless never more to make it known to the 
world. And, by God's help, I abide by this reso- 
lution; supposing I really had become acquainted 
with it since then. What wretched curiosity, curio- 
sity about a name ! about a couple of letters, which 
are arranged thus or thus ! I allow it to hold good, 
if we learn with and through the name, how far 
we can rely upon the testimony of a sneak. But 
here, where it is not a question of testimonies, of 
things, which simply rest upon testimonies; where 
reason is to prove the grounds in her own way : 
of what consequence is the name of him, who is 
the mere instrument of these grounds'? It is not 
only useless; but it often injures, because it gives 
room for a prejudice, which so lamentably detracts 
from all reasonable proofs. For either the anony- 
mous is recognised as a man, who was neither 
wanting in the will or power of knowing the truth ; 
and the people, to whom thinking is so disagreeable, 
are immediately carried away blindly by him. Or 
it is found, that the anonymous has been under a 
cloud ; and immediately the people will have nothing 
at all to do with him ; fixed in the charming opinion, 



LETTER XII. 125 

that he, who is deficient in one sense, must neces- 
sarily be wanting in all five. — So even literary men 
judge, who deem it no unimportant thing, to .hunt 
down anonymous and pseudonymous writers: and 
am I to judge and act more unphilosophically, than 
these men, who have a right thus to talk, to make 
useless and unphilosophical discoveries ? Prudentis 
est, says Heumann, in the same place, whence the 
motto of this piece is taken, ita quos vis dogmaticos 
libros legere, quasi auctor flane sit ignotus. Here 
the quasi is real. The reader has no occasion to 
forget, what he does not know. 

And now it may be imagined, how I looked, 
when I, impressed with these ideas, read the follow- 
ing passage of the Eeverend Gentleman. " Finally, 
" I again remind Mr. Lessing, that it is his duty, 
" to name the author of the Fragments, since he has 
"threatened, and tried to intimidate his opponents 
" by the discovery of his name, for it cannot be 
" unknown to him, what learned irreproachable men 
" have been given out as the author of these abor- 
" tions. The fault, that their ashes are so unjustifi- 
"ably defiled, rests with him, as long as he keeps 
4 ' back the name; and he can have so much less 
" hesitation in revealing it, since he has already 
" honoured with such eulogies the author and his 
" work." What ? Have I threatened to name the 
author of the Fragments ? Where then ] And 
is my duty grounded upon that, no longer to keep 
his name in the back ground 1 Upon this % As the 



126 LETTER XII. 

duty, so the motive to the fulfilment of the same ! 
I have given warning, not to meet the anonymous 
in too childish and school-boy a way, lest one should 
be ashamed, when it is at length discovered, who he 
was. Is that threatening ! Is that a threat, that it 
shall be disclosed by me? — That I at last will 
declare the name? — If the Reverend Gentleman 
has not here knowingly and premeditatedly written 
a falsehood : it is at least a proof, how he reads me. 
He never reads that, which I have written : but only 
that, which he would wish to have me write. 



LETTER XIII. 



Scandal or no Scandal! — What care If Necessity can break through 

iron, and without Scandal ! I would spar* the weak conscience, so 

far as may be, without danger to my soul. But if this may not be, 

I would guard the interests of my soul, though half or all the world 

be scandalized thereby. 

Luther. 

1778. 



Next it is absolutely unknown to me, what 
learned and irreproachable men, doubtless on the 
illusive representations of Mr. Mascho and E. in 
Hamburg, have been given out as the authors of 
the Fragments. But I am glad, that several are 
known there, who could have written something 
of the kind. It is no disgrace to any one whoever 
he may be; and what the Keverend Gentleman 
said about unjustifiable defiling of their ashes, I can 
understand neither in its proper nor figurative sense. 
Ashes care not about being mixed with mud; and 
the spirit, which animated these ashes, stands before 
the eyes of him, to whom it is no trouble, to dis- 
criminate between the real and the imputed author. 
The groping curiosity of mortals is a game for both, 
which is not worth their looking on ; and whoever 



128 LETTER XIII. 

reasonably endeavours to satisfy first this curiosity, 
most exasperates these sporting children. 

If the "Reverend Gentleman does not wish to be 
classed with these inquisitive, sporting children, 
let him only say, with what serious object in view, 
he would learn the name of my anonymous. Can 
he have his ashes burnt to ashes again] Shall his 
bones no longer rest in the earth, which so willingly 
received them ? Are they to be ground to dust, 
thrown into the water, — strewed to the wind ] The 
earth, in both cases, dear "Reverend Sir, receives 
them again. Or would you have the pleasure, to 
be able to write throughout all Germany, if any- 
where a relation or descendant is to be found, whom 
you may make feel, that he has in his line, or in 
his collateral lineage, ascending or descending, had 
such a good-for-nothing fellow? — Who is to blame, 
if he judges so badly of you] For men cannot 
argue altogether without grounds. No one, I hope, 
will endeavour to persuade me, who knows the 
licentiate, that he himself does not perceive as well 
as I do, how childish and useless this whole name- 
hunt is. And suppose even, that he were not of 
the same mind with me in this, that the name 
when discovered would even be injurious in the 
investigation of the matter; at any rate he will 
not deny, that it would be prejudicial to the tran- 
quillity and reputation to all those, who did not 
like to disown in the discovered authgr a friend 
or relation. — The curiosity of an honourable man 



LETTER XIII. 129 

willingly halts, when love of the truth impels it no 
farther, and love of his neighbour requires it to 
do so. 

Certainly it were so much the better, if the letters, 
which the licentiate has in his hands, put out of 
the question a man, whom many a weak fellow 
might wish as his guarantee. In fact, I myself 
know no one of the more recent learned men in 
all Germany, for whom it would be more excuse- 
able to be prejudiced in such matters, than him. 
But even on that account I would not willingly 
point to this man, and if he himself, in his own 
glorified person, had brought me the papers from 
that world, with the express request, to publish 
them in his name; and if afterwards he again 
appeared every second night, and repeated the same 
request, under I know not what threats or promises, 
I would say to him: "Dear Spirit, I will most 
" willingly publish your manuscript; though I am 
u sure that the matter is not without danger, and 
" they will upbraid me, with wishing to offend 
" thereby weak consciences. For with regard to 
" this offence, I think with Luther. Enough, I 
" cannot without danger to my soul put thy manu- 
" script under a bushel. It has raised doubts in me, 
" which I must have removed. And who else but 
" the public can remove them for me ? To apply 
" for that purpose by private letters to this or that 
'• theologian, costs money and time; and I have not 
" too much of these to throw away. Therefore, as I 

K 



130 LETTER XIII. 

" said, I will willingly publish your work ; but why 
" should I not publish it without your name ; are 
" you become more vain in yonder world, than you 
" were in this % Or does your name form a part 
" of the evidence ? If you attach importance to this 
" childish, vexatious ambition : I know, whence you 
" come. The glory which is about your head, is 
"deceptive; for you are little enough, to desire 
" another by its side." — 

This fancy reminds me again of the proposition, 
which I was about to make before. — If my anony- 
mous did not write from conviction ; not from inward 
impulse, to impart to his neighbour, what he held 
to be true : he can have had no other motive, than 
pitiful vain-glory, gloria cupiditatem sacrilegam ; 
and I find in all history no one to compare with 
him, except the madman, who wanted to burn the 
temple of Diana at Ephesus, tit opere pulcherrimo 
consumpto, nomen ejus per iotum terrarum orbem 
disjiceretur. When the enthusiast confessed on the 
rack this phrensy : what did the Ephesians do 7 ? 
They determined, in order to punish him in the most 
sensitive point, that no one should mention his 
name ; and we should not know it to this day, the 
name of the vain fool, if Theopompus iu his Histories 
had been willing to submit to this prudent arrange- 
ment. I follow the wise Ephesians ; in spite of 
Theopompus, after the example of Valerius, I do 
not name the monstrous coxcomb; and I submit: 
how, if we made a like arrangement among our- 



LETTER XIII. 131 

selves, and never named the sacrilegious wretch, 
(supposing, that we either knew or discovered his 
name) who, from vain-glory, would blast the rock, 
on which Christ built his Church'? — I imagine 
I collect the votes, I begin with the Patres conscripti 
of Lutheranism, an Ernesti, a Sender, a Teller, a 
Jerusalem, a Spalding, &c. and come down to the 
most insignificant village priest, who supplies his 
wants in the voluntary notices ; and all, all give 
their votes in the affirmative. 

Only one, one only, the Keverend Mr. Goeze 
says No. No! he thunders; and once more No! 
It is not enough that the anonymous is put to 
eternal shame in yonder world; he must also be 
put to shame in this transitory world. Amen! he 
adds • Amen ! 



k2 



LETTER XIV. 



Pro boni viri officio, si quando eum ad defensionem nocentium ratio 
duxerit, satisfaciam, 

QUINCTILIANUS. 

1778. 



I come at length to the third point, whereby 
I am made to come forward as the advocate of the 
anonymous. It consists in my conduct towards 
those, who take up the cause of the Christian 
Religion against him. 

This censure contains two propositions, to each 
of which I must answer separately. Either it is 
found strange and wrong, that I in general defend 
the anonymous against his adversaries ; or it is found 
at the same time so much the more strange and 
more wrong, that I do it in the tone, which they 
so highly upbraid in me. 

With regard to the first, I think I have already 
partly answered, that I gave myself out, not to 
speak for him as an advocate, who is determined 
to make his cause prevail, I only speak as an 
upright man, who will not see him condemned in 
so tumultuous a manner. At the utmost, I only 



LETTER XIV. 133 

so speak, as an advocate assigned to a criminal 
speaks ; and speak only in his stead ; and speak 
only, as one is wont to express himself in common 
life, to his soul. But I am so much the more bound 
to do so, because I have the greater part of his 
papers in my hands. It were treason to innocence, 
he may have more or less claim to it, if I found 
in these several papers the slightest thing, in any way 
to his advantage, and did not make it known. The 
treachery on my part would be so much greater, 
because I have been his publisher unasked, and 
have communicated pieces from him, as literary 
essays, which are torn from all connection, in which 
their real life consisted. Why would they not 
allow these essays to be, what they were meant to 
be ? Why have they been thought worthy of more 
attention, than Fragments of any kind deserve, to 
which no one is bound, to commit himself? Why 
have these connecting points, through which the 
anonymous refers to something elsewhere proved, 
been a mere blind, and thereby my integrity, as 
well as his, subjected to the most uncharitable sus- 
picion \ But more of this in another place. 

Here I may be allowed to add, what I am not 
ashamed to repeat, since it has been once stated, 
I have also thrust the anonymous into the world, 
because I did not wish to live with him alone, under 
one roof, any longer. He was incessantly in my 
ears, and I confess once more, that I had not always 
so much to oppose to his suggestions, as I could 



134 



LETTER XIV. 



have wished. A third party, thought I, must either 
bring us nearer together, or put us farther asunder : 
and this third party can be none other than the 
public. 

But should I not lose all the advantage, which 
I promised myself through this step, if I do not pay 
attention to every word, and to every look, with 
which he is received in public % I must ask every- 
one, who is startled, or laughs, or is frightened, or 
blusters at him : how do you understand this ? how 
do you prove this ? And I shall be hardly satisfied 
with the first best answer of the first best opponent. 
For if it really were the best, the best is not always 
good : and I know the best answers for a thousand 
doubts, without finding a single good one among 
them. 

Only let not this investigation, so hard to satisfy, 
be brought against me, as a proof, of what I so 
zealously deny. I shew myself just as little thereby 
the advocate of the anonymous (since it is to be 
called advocate) as I shew myself the advocate of 
the religion, which the anonymous attacks. For 
what has an upright advocate to do, before he under- 
takes a cause? After he has heard his client at 
sufficient length, — let him detail his case in all its 
length and breadth, examined and cross-examined 
him,* in aliam rursus ei personam transeundum est, 
agendusque adversarius, proponendum, quidquid 

* Quinctil. l. xii. 



LETTER XIV. 135 

omnino eoccogitari contra potest, quidquid recipit in 
ejusmodi disceptatione natura. Just so, do I. But 
he who replies most sharply to the defenders of 
religion, is not on that account most unfriendly to 
religion. For I become only thereby the champion 
of religion interrogare quam infestissime, ac premere, 
because likewise here, dum omnia qucerimus, ali- 
quando ad verum, ubi minime expectavimus, perveni- 
mus, because likewise here, optimus est in dicendo 
patronus incredulus. 

Hitherto I have been able to discharge this duty 
against myself but little. But I hope, in future, to 
do it better ; and to do it with all the coolness, with 
all the moderation against the persons, which could 
consist with that strength and warmth for the 
subject, which alone Quinctilian can have thought 
of, in the expression infestissime. 

" Ah but yes !" I hear the Keverend Gentle- 
man exclaim — and I am at the second part of this 
censure. " Ah but yes ! Let one depend on that, 
" and join issue with him ! We have the ex- 
u perience of that ; I and his neighbour. How 
" sneeringly has he written against us ; how scorn- 
" fully ; how contemptuously" ! 

Do you feel that, Reverend Sir? So much the 
better. Then I have gained my object with you ; 
but not nearly done, what you deserved. For after 
all you do not really belong to the opponents of my 
anonymous. You have refuted him on no single 
point up to this hour ; you have only abused him ; 



136 LETTER XIV. 

you are up to this hour only to be regarded as my 
opponent ; only as the opponent of an opponent 
of the anonymous. And in the next place you 
have taken liberties against this opponent of the 
anonymous, which you could only partially have 
been allowed to take against the anonymous. You 
have accused me of hostile attacks upon the Christian 
religion ; you have accused me of absolute blasphe- 
mies. Say yourself: do you know more infamous 
charges, than these ? Do you know charges, which 
entail on one more unqualified hate and persecution ? 
You rush upon me with this dagger, and am I to 
be able to defend myself against you no otherwise 
than with my hat in my hand \ Am I to remain 
quite still and deliberate, that your black gown be 
not dusted] Am I so to moderate every breath, 
that your peruke lose no powder % You shout after 
the dog, "he is mad"! knowing well, what the 
boys in the street conclude from it : and is the poor 
dog not even to bark at you \ is he not by barking 
to give you the lie? not to shew his teeth to you? 
That would be wonderful. Jerome says, that the 
charge of heresy (how much more that of irreligion ?) 
is of that kind in qua tolerantem esse, impietatis sit, 
non virtus. And yet, yet I had rather be guilty of 
this impiety, than not to make light of a virtue 
which is none at all. Decorum, bon ton, savoir 
vivre : miserable virtues of our effeminate age ! 
You are varnish, and nothing more. But just as 
often the varnish of vice, as of virtue. What do 



LETTER XlV. 137 

I care, whether my representations have this gloss 
or not? It cannot increase their effect; and I do 
not wish, that one must first seek, at a distance, the 
true light for my picture. — Say on, Eeverend Sir, what 
have I written against you, why you could not be 
and remain, as before, the head pastor in Hamburg? 
I on the other hand could not be, could not remain, 
what I am; if your lies were truth. Would you 
cut my nose off, and am I not to smoke your's with 
a little assa fcetida ? — 

It is true this is not quite my neighbour's case. 
But I have also no where treated him, like the 
Reverend Gentleman. Only his repeated reproach, 
that the anonymous will not see the truth, which 
he might see if he would ; only this reproach, which 
turns a man so entirely into a devil ; only this re- 
proach, a greater part of the poison of which, as 
I have proved, he has squirted back upon me : has 
made me, in the course of the argument, more 
bitter against him, than I had intended to be. 
And how bitter have I been against him'? The 
most bitter thing that I have said of him is "he 
" wrote in his sleep" ! Nothing more ? And will 
the Eeverend Gentleman conclude from this, that 
the Testament of John* in which universal brotherly 
love is so strongly recommended, cannot possibly be 
from me ? "Well then : so Jerome, from whom I 
took the Testament of John, had just as little of this 

* See Note A. 



138 LETTER XIV. 

love, as I ; and I am perfectly satisfied, that I have 
just as much of it as Jerome ; if not quite as much 
as the Keverend Mr. Goeze himself, who prefers 
sending his colleagues, from brotherly love, perpe- 
tually to sleep, rather than upbraid them with it. 
For Jerome says exactly to one of his opponents, 
neither more nor less, than I have said to my 
neighbour. He writes too with blunt words to 
Vigilantius; Ego reor, et nomen tibi tear avTi$pa<jiv 
impositum. Nam tota mente dormitas, et profundissimo 
non tarn somno stertis, qaam lethargo. The holy man 
likewise repeats the malicious quibble where ever 
he speaks of Vigilantius ; and if I have counted 
right, he may have called him as often expressly 
Dormitantius, as I have taken the liberty, to disturb 
my neighbour in his sleep. Nor have I the least 
fear, that my neighbour himself has taken up this 
joke so warmly, that he has made up his mind to 
have nothing more to do with me. By this I most 
assuredly should lose too much ; and I will rather 
immediately beg his pardon in the following words 
of Augustine: Obsecro te per mansuetudinem Christi, 
tit si te Icesi, dimittas mihi, nee, me vicissim Icedendo, 
malum pro malo reddas. Laides enim, si mihi tacueris 
errorem meum, quern forte inveneris in scriptis meis. — 
Now I was just about to ask the question ; which 
adversary of my anonymous, besides, I have opposed 
in an unbecoming, intimidating manner? when all 
at once a knight, with vizor neither up, nor down, 
vaults into the battle-field, and immediately in the 



LETTER XIV. 139 

distance, in the true tone of one of Homer's heroes, 
calls out to me : " I was to" ?— " How do you 
" know" ?— " Why did you" !— " Is it not true" ?— 
And hereupon an outcry about calumny, and a 
wedding-invitation certificate, that a subrector in 
an imperial city is just as much, as a librarian, who 
is styled court-councillor ! — Aye, for my part ten 
times more ! But does it apply to met I do not 
know you, Sir Knight. With permission, who are 
you % You surely are not Mr. M. Friedrich Daniel 
JBehn, subrector of the Lubeck gymnasium 1 Indeed ! 

how sorry I am, that I have written the subrector 
into a passion with my fourth Anti-Goeze, entirely 
against my will. But only think ! I have no where 
named you; I have no where quoted your work; 

1 have no where made use of your words. You 
say yourself, that the meaning, which I make ridi- 
culous, is not your's. And it is very possible, that 
it really is not; though the Reverend Mr. Goeze 
much more misrepresents you, when he tells us, 
how much you complain in your second section of 
the impropriety, of controverting the Christian reli- 
gion in the German language. What, if I only 
had to do with this man, who declares every thing 
improper, which is not adapted to his stuff? What 
if I only had to do with those, who have by word 
of mouth intimated this opinion to me a hundred 
times ? How is it clear then, that I wished the 
world to understand, as if you were of this same 
opinion ? Is it because I have put it into the mouth 



140 



LETTER XIV. 



of a subconrector % But you are not indeed sub- 
conrector, but subrector. Why should I be supposed 
to have rather degraded the latter in the former, 
than not to have meant the latter under the former ? 
May I not then call a pedant subconrector, because 
Mr. Behn is subrector ? Or do you wish absolutely 
to have first invented the differences between objec- 
tive and subjective religion, and first used it ; so 
that I must necessarily have made you known, 
because I have used it after you? — I observe, my 
dear Mr. Subrector, you are a little over proud ; but 
even more hasty, than proud ; and I pity your class. 
As often as a youth laughs, he must have laughed 
at the subrector, — et vapulat. 



NOTE (A.) — THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN. 141 



NOTE A. 

The Testament of John. 

Jerome says (in Epist. ad. Galatas, c. 6.) 
The blessed Evangelist John, when he was tarry- 
ing in extreme old age at Ephesus, and was brought 
with difficulty to the church, in the arms of his 
disciples, was wont with faltering tongue, that 
had well nigh " forgot her cunning," to repeat only 
one sentence: "little children love one another." 
"Master," the disciples said, "why ever harping 
" upon one string ?" " Because," he replied, in 
words worthy of that great Apostle, "it is our 
" Lord's command, and if realized sufiiceth.' , 

Upon this passage Lessing has written an inter- 
esting dialogue (Sammtliche Schriften, v. 129 — 139, 
Berlin, 1818.) 



142 NOTE (B.) — THE BOOK OF JOB. 



The Book of Job. 

The gem of the Bible ; the most truthful portion, 
because wearing honestly the garb of a didactic 
poem, with supernatural agents introduced, merely 
as appropriate machinery. 

To make Job a good Christian, by playing on 
the words, "my Redeemer," mars the whole scope 
of the work. With the Christian revelation of a 
future state, there would be no riddle of the Universe 
to solve, and comparatively no ground for distrust 
or impatience. 

The author of Job has left a work of religious 
art, grand, sublime, immortal, as was the Olympian 
Zeus of Pheidias; but the Hebrew with more of 
religion, or less thirst for fame than the great Athe- 
nian, — what matters the name, when the hand 
that wrote is mouldering in the dust ? — was content 
that his name be found written only in the book 
of life. It contains philosophical enquiries into 
God's moral dealings with man, which enquiries 
are vindicated against hypocritical, self-styled Ortho- 
doxy, when it "lies for God." It maintains the 



NOTE (b.) THE BOOK OF JOB. 143 

right of freedom of thought against established 
doctrines. The form of the poem is dramatic, but 
of the simplest kind, presenting a mere assemblage 
of friends. The mind, " a chartered libertine," 
revolts at the unqualified statements in the mosaic 
writers, that worldly prosperity awaits the good, 
and God allows the appeal, but declares " his un- 
" suffering kingdom yet will come." 

It is probably a picture of the mental struggle of 
a Jewish captive in Egypt, about the time of Jere- 
miah. He uses the word captivity, as synonymous 
with deep distress. Satan is a half Chaldaic, half 
Persic personification. 

The author, though a Hebrew, has assumed 
the garb of a free son of the desert, in order to 
emancipate himself from the narrowing influences 
of national peculiarities, and to erect with undis- 
turbed freedom, amid the distant scenes of majestic 
nature, and in the remote age of patriarchal sim- 
plicity, a mighty work, which should stand as an 
everlasting witness of the human mind stretching 
towards heaven. 

It is a marvellous sight, the infantine humanity, 
in this Syro-Arabian, first grappling, as a Heracles, 
with those coiled snakes, the unsolved riddles, evil 
and its origin, — the mysteries of our existence — 
which baffle to this day, its senile philosophy, in 



144 NOTE (B.) THE BOOK OF JOB. 

Leibnitz and in Hegel. Where do we find the sighs 
of suffering man, " the groans of the creation, 
travailing together, waiting for redemption from 
the bondage of corruption," so calmed, as by a 
mother's gentle voice, so soothed as by an Angel's 
harp, — as in the book of Job % — Transl. 









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